The picture taken on March 14, 2006, shows containers are loaded onto a large foreign container ship in the busy port of Tianjin, a municipality near Beijing. (Xinhua Photo)

    BEIJING, May 8 -- China's port and shipping facilities are to be upgraded to include two major new regions, the Ministry of Communications has announced.

    Five port "clusters," rather than the existing three surrounding Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tianjin, will become the new priorities as part of a new port development plan.

    The outline of the plan to revise Chinese port facilities was made by Communications Minister Li Shenglin.

    The minister said the two additional port groups are located on the mainland side of the Taiwan Straits in southern Fujian; and in Hainan and southern Guangdong.

    The plan is part of an effort to match the national 2006-10 social and economic development programme, Li said.

    Li said China's sea ports and their relative easy access to containers and industrial materials had been a major factor in transforming the nation's economy.

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    "Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tianjin have already been built into national ocean transportation hubs," he said.

    Shanghai, located at the mouth of the Yangtze River, is the largest business city of China serving the versatile urban economic network across the Yangtze River Delta.

Transport trucks are loaded with containers at Shekou Port in Shenzhen. Shenzhen handled a record number of containers in 2005, keeping its ranking as the world's fourth-busiest port. (Photo: China Daily)

    Shenzhen is becoming an increasingly important support centre of Hong Kong, and is in itself leading many smaller ports on the Pearl River Delta, where China's largest group of exporting manufacturers are located.

    Tianjin, close to Beijing and a key link of all the sea ports around the Bohai Bay, is vital to the economy of northern China.

    However, Li said the two newly planned port clusters would be of no less importance.

    The southeastern port cluster would be built around its centre of Xiamen, a business centre of southern Fujian joined by Fuzhou, Quanzhou, Putian and Zhangzhou.

    Zhangzhou will serve as a destination for China's import of crude oil and natural gas, and all others will be mainly handling containers.

    The Fujian port blueprint is part of the central government's scheme of the Western Shore Economic Zone of the Taiwan Straits.

    It was designed to help develop economic ties between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan.

    Li said this would anticipate the "mainland-Taiwan free trade relations" that, although there had been little progress so far, would benefit business communities on both sides of the Straits.

    Xiamen is already a large port. Zhang Changping, the mayor Xiamen, recently expressed the municipal government's will to boost its annual throughput from 70 million tons to 100 million tons.

    In southwest China, Zhanjiang, Fangcheng and Haikou will form a system of container transportation. Zhanjiang, Haikou and other ports will also serve as places to download and reserve imported crude oil and natural gas. And Zhanjiang, Fangcheng and Basuo have been designed to become ports to import mineral resources.

    Passenger transport infrastructures will be improved in Zhanjiang, Haikou and Sanya in the coming five years, according to the national programme.

    Li said the newly drafted port development plan was aimed at "expanding the transportation capacity of the Chinese coast to match the economy's fast growth."

    He forecast that China's ocean cargo handling capacity will rise from 3.8 billion tons in 2005 to 5 billion tons in 2010, and its coastal throughput of containers, as measured in TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit), will grow from 74.41 million in 2005 to 130 million in 2010.

    Chai Haitao, a researcher with the International Trade Research Academy of the Ministry of Commerce, said the plan for the new round of port expansions had been undertaken because of the future economic development in China and the world.

    Chai predicted that China's foreign trade would grow at an annual rate of 15 per cent between 2006-10, so that almost all of China's major sea ports would undergo expansions in the next few years.

    Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has predicted that the world's economy would grow at an annual rate of 4.2 per cent during 2006-09, relatively higher than that during the 2001-05 period. And in the coming five years, China will continue to be the world's economic engine with annual growth of no less than 8 per cent.

    China has been the world's biggest cargo producer since 2004, with Shanghai being the world's largest port in handling tonnage. Ten out of the world's 25 largest sea ports are already in China.

    Li announced the plans in a special interview with China Daily at a recent sea transport forum in the port city of Tianjin.

    (Source: China Daily)