Opening up the Chinese shipping market 1988–2018: The perspective of Chinese shipping companies facing foreign competition Linyan Huang * , Fr ed eric Lasserre, Pauline Pic, Yeuk-Yin Chiu Geography Department, Laval University, Quebec, Canada ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Chinese shipping market Chinese shipping companies Foreign shipping companies Container shipping Market share ABSTRACT Chinese shipping industry has experienced a rapid growth in the past three decades. With the analysis of the Chinese ﬂeet capacity and the evolution of its market share in Chinese freight market, this paper reveals that foreign shipping companies took a majority share of ocean shipping while Chinese state-owned shipping com- panies have the upper hand in coastal and river shipping markets. Chinese private shipping companies were squeezed to either be a subcontractor or be conﬁned in a niche market. This paper collects data from Chinese ofﬁcial shipping report and Chinese academic publications. It reveals that the prosperity of China's shipping market has not enabled the emergence of strong and very competitive Chinese shipping companies when facing foreign competitors. 1. Introduction Thanks to the sharp increase in volume of seaborne trade, shipping is one of the industries that beneﬁts the most from the rising manufacturing sector since 1978. The extremely rapid expansion of raw materials im- ports to sustain growth, and the exports of Chinese products to the world market all nurtured the Chinese shipping industry. The objective of this paper is to portray the evolution of two major players in the Chinese shipping market, which are foreign shipping companies and Chinese state-owned companies. With expanding raw material imports and manufacturing exports, Chinese shipping com- panies experienced a strong expansion since 1988; however, contrary to a largely entrenched perception, they did not manage to achieve a domi- nant market position in the Chinese shipping market and appeared to be ﬁnancially fragile. This paper aims to analyze the reasons of the inability of Chinese shipping companies to retain market dominance over foreign shipping competitors in the Chinese shipping market, since the opening of ocean shipping to foreign companies in 1988. If port activities in China have been well studied in the literature of transport geography (Song, 2002; Cullinane et al., 2004; Rimmer and Comtois, 2004; Wang and Slack, 2004; Cullinane and Wang, 2006; Yeo et al., 2008; Wang and Cullinane, 2014), there is little international literature on the evolution of the Chinese shipping market (Comtois, 1999; Haralambides and Yang, 2003; Tiwari et al., 2003; Cullinane, 2005). Comtois (1999) assessed the integration of port and shipping companies; Tiwari et al. (2003) devel- oped an analysis of the choice criteria of Chinese forwarders for ports and carriers; Haralambides and Yang (2003) developed an analysis of an unfolding Chinese shipping policy, as Kane (2002), Vedernikov and Vedernikov (2012) had underlined the merchant marine sector was considered as a strategic tool to foster economic growth, but in the short term the Chinese shipping sector was still weak (Sun, 1999). The importance of shipping and shipbuilding, however, had not been fully realized by Chinese policy makers in the early years of the People's Re- public. Only after the Sino-Soviet split in 1960 did China begin to contemplate developing its own national merchant marine. Thereafter, it took almost two decades for China to launch a ‘great leap forward’ in shipping and shipbuilding industries in the late 1970s (Song, 1990). Cullinane (2005) sheds light on the impact of China's accession to the WTO. None of these papers tackles with the market structure and how it is shared between foreign, Chinese state-owned and Chinese private shipping companies. This paper sheds light on the factors involved in shaping the industry and the market share between these three players and reveals the inﬂuence of government interventions in Chinese ship- ping market. Meanwhile, this paper also touches upon how Chinese shipping companies tried to adapt to the opening up of the Chinese ocean shipping market to foreign competition. As there is little literature in English on the evolution of the Chinese shipping market, we relied on Chinese sources, particularly Chinese * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: Lin-yan.huang.1@ulaval.ca (L. Huang), Frederic.Lasserre@ggr.ulaval.ca (F. Lasserre), Pauline.pic.1@ulaval.ca (P. Pic), Yeuk-yin.chiu.1@ulaval. ca (Y.-Y. Chiu). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Asian Transport Studies journal homepage: www.journals.elsevier.com/asian-transport-studies https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eastsj.2020.100004 Received 15 June 2020; Accepted 16 June 2020 Available online 5 August 2020 2185-5560/© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Eastern Asia Society for Transportation Studies. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Asian Transport Studies 6 (2020) 100004