Tianjin Port: World-class Nexus

Rags to Riches

However, 60 years ago, the war-torn port was functionally irrelevant due to a silt-up of the navigation channels. Its five 5,000-ton-class wharves were in disrepair, and its land area insignificant for a modern port – a mere 0.18 square kilometers.

Following the founding of the People's Republic, three years of construction work prepared it for reopening in 1952. A year later when Mao Zedong visited, he concluded China needed more of this impressive upgrading, issuing a directive for "more and better ports throughout the country." Still, Tianjin Port had no large-scale machinery or advanced equipment. Stevedores handled 740,000 tons of cargo annually with wooden rollers and crowbars. In three difficult years from 1959 to 1961, Tianjin Port completed the second phase of its expansion. In the early 1970s, to solve the problem of port congestion, Premier Zhou Enlai approved a third phase of expansion, with the order to correct "the backward look of the port within three years." In 1974, on the 22nd anniversary of its reopening, handling capacity exceeded 10 million tons.

Tianjin in particular found its feet under the new freedoms and responsibilities afforded by Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening-up policy. By 1984, with the approval of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council, Tianjin Port took the lead in implementing port reform, a key feature being that it must generate its own operating revenues. Within two years the port had doubled the width of its 27-kilometer channel to create double-lane navigation that alleviated port congestion; it prepared to handle bulk good imports and exports such as coal, and constructed China's first specialized container wharf, taking the lead in container shipping through the Eurasian Continental Bridge. Through joint venture funding, China's first commercial bonded warehouse soon followed. By 1986, the port's cargo throughput tripled to 30 million tons.

On his inspection tour of Tianjin Port in August 1986, Deng Xiaoping commented on the two years of reform, "The people are the same people, and the land is the same land, but your performance has improved significantly following the reform. It is only giving you the power that has made the difference."

To keep up with the international trend of specialization and gigantism in merchant ships in the 1990s, the port broke the old mindset of "using deep shores for deep wharves and shallow shores for shallow ones," and, based on scientific studies, sketched out an ambitious plan for building a gigantic deep-water port for international shipping.

Meantime, the port management continued with state-owned enterprise reform and progressed to the introduction of a shareholding system, finally getting the port listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing Limited. The two capital markets provided badly needed financial guarantees for the implementation of the "mega port" plan. During this period, Tianjin Port deepened its navigation channels from a 50,000-ton to a 100,000-ton level, renovated old wharf facilities, and built three specialized wharves to accommodate big coal, coke and container ships. As a result of its efforts, the world's most advanced fourth-generation container ships began to arrive at its shores, and by 2001 its cargo throughput broke the 100-million-ton point, ranking the port in the world's top ten.