China: Traditional marine sector accelerating technical upgrading

News was prepared under the information support of Online Daily Newspaper on Hellenic and international Shipping "Hellenic Shipping News".

17 May 2008

In the 2007 Statistic Communique of China's Marine Industry, a group of favorable data has been used to present a situation that the marine economy had been growing up steadily: China's gross ocean product increased by 15.1 percent year on year to RMB 2,492.9 billion yuan. The growth in the traditional marine industry is especially spectacular: the marine transportation industry continued to maintain a rapid growth and realized an increment of RMB 341.4 billion yuan, up 21.1 percent year on year, in the whole year. And an increment of RMB 44.8 billion yuan, up 17.6 percent year on year, was realized in the marine shipping industry in the whole year and the industry become the No. 1 in the world in terms of newly received orders...
Mr. Wang Hong, a Vice Director of the State Bureau of Oceanic Administration, said, "The attributes of high tech are a characteristic of the marine economy, the growth and development of which will be impossible without supports and maintenance with marine technologies. The contributions of high technologies to the structural optimization, transformation and upgrading of the marine economy cannot be left unrecognized."
Seaport construction is a precondition for the development of the marine transportation industry. China's bedrock coast is over 5,000 km long. There are a lot of bays going deep into the land as the coastline zigzags and capes alternate with bays. Those bays tend to have narrow banks and beaches, steep slopes and a deep-water body, so it is suitable to build them into large and medium-sized ports. With a large number of high technologies adopted, the scale of port construction along the coast in China keeps up enlarging and the construction is developing to new sites at the estuaries and in the bays, where there will be a vast area and a deep-water body. And the level of mechanization and automatization in ports is continuously boosting up.
In addition, as ports rely on the sea while cities make use of ports for purpose of harmonious development, the simultaneous construction of facilities to prevent environmental pollutions has guaranteed the sustainable economic development of ports. For instance, in Xiamen Port, the Port's operations have been made quicker and more convenient due to the force of technologies while such high-tech systems as the Ship Pilotage and Conduction in the Integrated Port of Xiamen and the piloting system and the construction ship monitoring system have been introduced or developed.
Statistics show that up till 2007, China had been maintaining its ranking as No.1 in the world in five consecutive years in terms of cargo throughput and container throughput of ports. The container throughput of Shanghai Port amounted to 26.15 million standard containers, thus having been listed as No. 2 in the world.
"Like agriculture, the marine fishery will be easily affected by natural conditions. As a result, such technical capacities for the marine fishery as the enhancement and cultivation technology, key technologies for the prevention and control of diseases, schemes on fathering the marine environment in mariculture areas, the development of ocean fishing resources play a decisive role in the development of marine fishing as an industry." said Wang Hong.
In allusion to the need to conduct strategic adjustments to the structure of marine fishing, great efforts are being made in China to drive the sea-cage culture to develop into deep-water sea areas. Research and development are being gradually conducted in proper sequence in three phases from equipment manufacture, culture technology to culture industrial chains, and deep-water sea-cage culture has gradually achieved the scale, intensiveness, and industrialization. The deep-water sea-cage equipment independently developed in China has experienced quite a few strong typhoons in recent years, and products of such a kind have been gradually spread and applied in the coastal areas of China, thus having become an important direction for the adjustment to the fishing structure.
To develop the ocean fishery industry with great efforts, a new type of factory-trawlers, squid jiggers, pelagic tuna jiggers and 1,000-ton pelagic tuna purse-seiners have been designed and built in China to replace those timeworn and out-of-date oceangoing workboats while breakthroughs have been made in the technology to conduct tuna longline fishing operations by putting fishing hooks in effectively at a depth between 300m and 400m.
Driven by high technologies, the strategic adjustments to the economic structure in both the fishing industry and the fishing areas of China evolved successfully in 2007 and an increment of RMB190.4 billion yuan had been realized in the ocean fishing industry. Ocean fishing technologies are leading fishing production to stride forward towards a sustainable development with such characteristics as optimization and high yield.
Wang Hong believed, "To improve the level of the ocean shipping industry and increase added values, it will be necessary to research and master substantive technologies to manufacture shipborne hi-tech equipment." Therefore, a series of shipborne hi-tech equipments, including shipboard meteorological instrument and shipboard 150 kHz acoustic Doppler current profiler, have been independently developed in China in recent years.
The shipboard meteorological instrument is a kind of ship-borne automatic instrument independently developed in China, which will be used to measure hydrologic and meteorological elements. Such instruments can automatically measure and store data on all kinds of hydrologic and meteorological elements and auxiliary data on ship orientation, speed, and ship direction, etc. while exporting data measured in a real time basis other ship-borne equipments, which will share measured data with one another. The sets of equipment of such a kind have been put into use extensively on such ships as oceanographic survey ships, China ocean surveillance ships, and marine automatic platform stations and favorable economic and social benefits have been obtained.
The shipboard 150 kHz acoustic Doppler current profiler can rapidly obtain a three-dimensional section of the velocity field in the sea area when the ship is navigating there, and it is featured in a high measuring precision, speediness, being highly efficient, and less time- and labor-consuming. A national invention patent has been applied for such a kind of equipment and there has initially shaped up the capacity for production in batches, thus imported products can be replaced.
Just as there exist high technologies and hi-tech equipments, at present, China's shipping industry that started with general cargo ships, bulk cargo ships, and crude oil tankers have already obtain the capability to build up a good many kinds of ships, including large-scale liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) carriers, LPG carriers, large-scale TEU reefer container ships, roll on/roll off ships.
For the moment, China's marine economy is in a development stage with exuberant vitality and the marine industry has been listed as one of the eight key hi-tech industries to be developed in the Plan for the Development of Hi-Tech Industries during the Eleventh Five-Year Period. "So long as opportunities can be grasped to drive the development of marine science and technology with great efforts, it is for sure that the traditional marine industry can get optimized and upgraded while developing steadily with strong technological supports." said Wang Hong.

Source: China Economic Net.