Trade Reorientation and Its Effects on Regional Port Systems: The Korea‐China Link along the Yellow Sea Rim

Abstract

Owing to its competitive labor costs, its open-market policy, and a substantial amount of capital investments, China has become a global manufacturing pole and an export-based economy replicating the conventional Asian model but on a much wider scale. This is creating acute competition on other Asian export-based economies such as Korea that have to adapt to the "China effect." Consequently, many Korean manufacturing companies have repositioned their capital and equipment in China to enlarge their market potential as well as to reduce their production costs. Because Korea is adjacent to China-both are sharing the Yellow Sea Rim-this shift is creating a unique geographical dimension with a high level of functional integration of Sino-Korean manufacturing supply chains. This transition has also brought substantial changes in the regional logistic network by organizing new flows of raw materials, parts, and final products, most of them along the Yellow Sea Rim. New logistic flows have given substantial influences on regional port competition by creating diverse links. These changes are bringing a reorientation of the regional maritime industry and of the port system. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing.

Port integration in China: Temporal pathways, spatial patterns and dynamics

“…Research indicates a significant potential for growth pertaining to Yangtze River (YR) shipping; Veenstra and Notteboom (2011) theorize the regionalization phase of the YR is primarily related to Shanghai port, and Wang and Ducruet et al (2012) analyzed the integration between Shanghai port and Yangshan port. However, ports in other regions have yet to receive similar academic attention, most notably the Bohai Rim (Lee and Rodrigue, 2006;Chen et al, 2005). Due to the identified paucity of literature focusing on port integration strategies, particularly in the context of port merg-ers and investments, the current paper focuses exclusively on the nature of port integration in China, with a specific emphasis on integration character, mode and regularity by drawing the timeline and temporal path, thus highlighting the specific dynamic mechanisms involved.…”

China’s Global Shipping Connectivity: Internal and External Dynamics in the Contemporary Era (1890–2016)

“…This evolution is partly explained by the growing centralization of Northeast Asia's liner shipping networks upon transshipment hubs such as Busan in Korea and Kaohsiung in Taiwan (Ducruet et al, 2010), as well as increasing trade between China and South Korea (Lee and Rodrigue, 2006). By comparison, Hong Kong kept its role as a major external node, although one can observe a gradual decline of its share since its partial retrocession in 1997, which directly provoked a shift in liner shipping network configurations, with the first direct call of Evergreen, a major shipping line, to a Chinese mainland port, Yantian, in 1998 (Wang, 1998).…”

China’s container-related dynamics, 1990–2005

“…At one stage Hong Kong served China south of the Yangtze and Busan in Korea usurped the position of Japanese ports by offering better cost-quality combinations to serve northern China and even some parts of Japan. This pattern is changing with the integration of China's deep-sea ports into global production chains, resulting in a shift away from 'offshore' ports such as Busan and Kaohsiung in Taiwan (Lee and Rodrigue 2006;OECD 2005, pp. 41-45).…”

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