Tianjin port to build the 'golden bridge' for Belt and Road Initiative

On May 17, Cangzhou Bohai New District Administrative Committee, Tianjin Port (Group), and Hebei Port Group signed an agreement to promote the development of the container industry at Huanghua Port. It is the second time for Tianjin's port to strategically cooperate with Hebei ports. Now, Tianjin's port is actively integrating into the Belt and Road Initiative and is a pivotal maritime gateway for the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, focusing on constructing a "golden bridge" that links Northeast Asia with Central and Western Asia and also covers Europe, consolidating the strategic stronghold of the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, and the eastern starting point of the China- Mongolia-Russia economic corridor.

A container is loaded in Tianjin before making its way to Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan.[Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn/Wang Lei]

From January to April in 2017, the port in Tianjin has seen a freight volume of 18,520 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit), increasing 45 percent year-on-year and further consolidating and elevating its position in bolstering the Belt and Road Initiative.

Tianjin's port plays an increasingly important role in incorporating the city into the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road both strategically and economically. In recent years, the port has concentrated on building international multimodal transport channels and optimizing the layout of land ports in the hinterlands, and gradually forming logistics networks for continental economic and trade, making the countries and regions along the Silk Road routes into important nodes.

In order to set up the two-way cross-border logistics platform at Tianjin's port, it has vigorously developed rail-sea combined transport, built the largest central railway container station in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, and started to run Sino-European freight trains from Tianjin to Belarus and Russia. It has also established transportation networks and the international transportation channel of Tianjin-Mongolia-Russia.

Furthermore, Tianjin has set up 25 land ports and five regional marketing centers, covering 5 million square kilometers and occupying 52 percent of the total hinterland areas of China, so as to further improve the layout of the land ports related to the Belt and Road Initiative, helping form a multi-layered and networked modern logistics system and achieve full coverage of the main economic hinterland.

In addition, Tianjin has some remarkable advantages in transportation container services. Every week, 120 Sino-European container liners and more than 550 direct flights transport goods from Tianjin to other main international ports and provide many domestic feeder services to other surrounding ports, such as Qihuangdao, Jingtang, and Caofeidian, with the annual container throughput reaching 800,000 TEU and 20 regular cargo ships. Even the world's top container shipping companies—including Maersk Line, Mediterranean Shipping Company, and CMA-CGM— regard it as a pivotal port for international container services and operate their regular cargo ships (from 16,000 TEU to 20,000 TEU) here.