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From a cargo port to cruise, shipping hub
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Wang Chi takes a walk to the riverside of the North Bund area in Hongkou District with his former colleagues every week. They stand along the Huangpu River and try to remember where the former docks and warehouses stood, where they sweated to load and unload cargo in the 1960s when they were still young.
Wang always remembers more than his colleagues since he worked as a porter for 12 years. Sometimes, he will take a lead in singing the work songs of their former workplace, which has been replaced by a cruise liner harbor and modern office buildings for an international shipping center.
The 62-year-old Wang retired as general manager of the Shanghai International Passenger Transportation Center, a centerpiece structure nicknamed “drip,” since it’s blue and shaped like a drop of water, at the North Bund for cruise liner passengers.
“I can barely remember details of how the former port looked, though I worked there for over 43 years, from a porter to the senior official, and witnessed its overwhelming changes,” Wang says.
It took only 10 years to turn the 140-year-old Gaoyang Road Dock, the city’s and the nation’s earliest port for foreign cargo, into a cruise liner hub.
Docks and cranes along the river have become wharfs for international liners. The hundreds of porters like Wang have been replaced by over a million foreign visitors from all around world every year.
The North Bund area opposite Pudong’s Lujiazui Financial Zone has been developing rapidly to become a world-class cruise liner hub and financial center to support the city’s plan to become an international shipping center by 2020.
“By attracting the headquarters of major financial institutions, it is also set to become ‘China’s Boston,’ rivaling the city on the east coast of the United States,” says Wu Qing, Party chief of Hongkou District.
The North Bund has seen 105 financial institutions open offices between January and June — up 20 percent from the same time period in 2012.
“The district government initially planned to build a shipping industry street, later expanding the plan to be a complex and eventually developing it into today’s shipping and financial hub with many headquarters of the world’s major shipping enterprises,” says Lu Qingdong, vice president of the district’s top political advisory body.
Lu, former director of the Hongkou Shipping Transportation Office, was the chief planner in making the former cargo port into a modern shipping and financial hub. His office on the 10th floor of the district government building has a panoramic view of the North Bund area.
The era of the North Bund’s cruise liner industry began in October 2003 with the arrival of Royal Caribbean International, the first international cruise liner in the city.
Lu still keeps a planning book for the event in the bottom of one of his drawers as a memento of the time the Royal Caribbean liner berthed on the North Bund for the first time.
He invited 100 officials from government departments and the then-vice mayors of Shanghai to take an overnight trip on the liner to experience cruise liner travel. The officials held seminars and brainstormed on the trip to the East China Sea and back to develop plans to turn the North Bund into a shipping hub.
China’s first batch of international shipping companies, for instance, set up their Chinese subsidiaries in the North Bund around 2010. Before that, the world’s major shipping companies were allowed to establish only offices to coordinate their work in China because policies didn’t allow for more. Lu applied to the Ministry of Transportation to expand their presence and spent over two years to receive a nod from Beijing.
Now, over 13 of the world’s major shipping agencies and institutions, including Switzerland’s Gearbulk and Braemar Seascope from the UK, have set up subsidiary bases in the North Bund. Another milestone for the North Bund development is the establishment of the Shanghai Shipping Freight Exchange, China’s first shipping freight third-party centralized trading platform, in 2009.
The exchange began publishing China’s first dry bulk and oil tanker indexes last November, based on prices collected from charters, brokers and ship owners.
Now, the new indexes have improved China’s say in global shipping markets and are seen as a challenge to the Baltic Dry Index. The longtime benchmark for global shippers is compiled by Baltic Exchange Ltd.
The exchange now runs container-shipping indexes, which are closely watched, given China’s role as a major exporter of goods such as toys and garments.
However, the transformation from a cargo port zone to a shipping and financial hub was not always easy. First, the 11 cargo companies in the 1.42-square-kilometer area along the river had to be relocated to other harbors, while over 18,000 porters and workers faced unemployment.
“It was quite painful to fire the workers because many of them were my fellow companions. We joined the Shanghai Harbor Company together in 1968 after graduating from local middle schools,” says Wang, the retired general manager of the Shanghai International Passenger Transportation Center.
The area near the passenger center where Yang worked as a porter now provides supporting commercial facilities totaling some 300,000 square meters, including restaurants, cafes and shops for the cruise center.
Waterfront attractions have not been forgotten, either. A 2.6-kilometer stretch of promenade along the Huangpu River has opened for sightseeing.
Wang plans to write books and invite a local TV station to film a documentary on the history and development of the North Bund.
“I might remember less and less of the former port as I grow older, so I have to leave behind some valuable information about the development of the area,” he says.
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