Tianjin megaport: the gateway to China
German cars are popular in China. Almost every car imported into the People's Republic arrives through the Tianjin megaport. A site visit.
German cars are popular in China. Almost every car imported into the People’s Republic arrives through the megaport of Tianjin. Handelsblatt correspondent Stephan Scheuer visited the facility.
Background
The port of Tianjin, around 160 kilometres east of Beijing, is the most important sea gateway to China’s capital region and one of the ten largest container ports in the world. More than 20 million containers are handled there every year – a large share of imports for the metropolises of Beijing and Tianjin.
This report was made less than two years after the devastating explosion at a chemicals warehouse in August 2015, in which over 170 people died and entire residential districts were destroyed. The causes – illegally stored hazardous materials, inadequate safety controls and regulatory failure – subsequently led to tighter requirements for Chinese ports: new minimum-distance rules for hazardous goods, regular safety audits and stricter licensing procedures.
Tianjin is also a central element of the New Silk Road. The port’s partnership with Rotterdam and its expansion as a deep-water terminal show how important logistics is to China’s global trade strategy. Chinese state enterprises such as Cosco Shipping and China Merchants have in recent years acquired stakes in ports worldwide – from Piraeus to Hamburg to Chancay in Peru.
The COVID pandemic shook China’s port economy. Zero-Covid measures in 2021 and 2022 triggered repeated shutdowns that caused weeks-long backlogs in global supply chains. At the same time the volume of freight on the old Trans-Siberian Railway route to Europe shifted following Russia’s war of aggression – part of the cargo was rerouted back onto sea lanes.
In 2024 Tianjin recorded 22.9 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) of container throughput – a new record. At this scale the port is not a national but a global piece of infrastructure: without it neither northern China nor a significant part of intercontinental trade between East and West functions.