Dalian, a port city in northeast China's Liaoning Province, has launched an ambitious plan to build itself into an international shipping center for northeast Asia.

Under the plan, the Dalian port is expected to handle 80 million tons of petroleum, 20 million tons of ores and ten million TEUs each year by 2010.

Vice Minister Zhang Guobao in charge of the State Development and Reform Commission (SDRC) said recently at a conference on the city's port construction that Dalian enjoys more advantages than others to become an important shipping center in northeast Asia.

Located at the key junction of the Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea, Dalian is one of the largest ports on China's coast, passing through which is a good portion of the sea borne commerce of the three Northeast China provinces of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang and eastern Inner Mongolia.

The decision to build Dalian into an international shipping center was initiated by the central government last year in its development strategy for the northeast China, the country's old industrial base, said Zhang, who also leads the State Council's office of northeast China development strategy.

Zhang said Dalian has been selected as the state petroleum storage base, and a group of key infrastructure projects based in Dalian have also started construction, including the Yantai-Dalian Ferry Railway, renovation of the Shenyang-Dalian highway, and the Dalian containers distribution center, with all these moves to accelerate the port's construction into an international shipping center.

Zhang Wenyue, governor of Liaoning, told the conference that the province is working on series of supporting policies on the ports and shipping companies based in Dalian, including special financial and tax-reduction support to encourage more domestic and overseas shipping giants investing in the Dalian port.

With the improved investment environment of the port city, every month more than 50 shipping companies registered to open business on the port in the first eight months this year, including many international giants such as Maersk Shipping of Denmark and NYK Line of Japan, the municipal government said.

According to the government, the Dalian Port Group is working with Maersk, the Singapore Port Group and China's shipping giant COSCO to invest 240 million yuan (about US$29 million) on the second-phase project of the Dayaowan container dock of Dalian,which will greatly expand the port's capacity in containers transportation.

In addition, the Dalian Port Group also signed contracts in September with Japan's largest shipping company, the Nippon Yusen Kaisha Cony (NYK Line), for the construction and operation of the port's automobile dock, key containers dock and ore dock in the future.

To speed up the port's construction, Dalian will take steps to open its port and shipping market in the future, the local government said.

More overseas companies will be welcomed to make Dalian their regional headquarters, and international shipping giants are welcomed to open more international freight lines linking the outside world with Dalian, said the government.

Customs statistics show that in the first ten months this year, the Dalian port handled a total of 116 million tons of goods, a year-on-year surge of 12 percent, in which the total of containership 1.75 million TEUs, up 33.6 percent over the same period of last year.

At present, 90 percent of the containers were handled at the Dayaowan containers dock of Dalian. With the second-phase and the third-phase projects of the dock finished by 2010, the dock is expected to handle eight million TEUs of containers, and the port's handling capacity will hit ten million TEUs, according to the port authority.    

(Xinhua News Agency December 5, 2004)