New tendency of Chinese container port system: 1998–2010

By Hirschman–Herfindahl Index, the paper measures the spatial structure transformation of the Chinese container port system from the perspective of cargo flow in recent 13 years. It indicates that the spatial structure of container port system enters into “the challenge of the periphery” phase as a whole, the decentralization of container flow become the mainstream tendency of the spatial variation of China’s container port system; on the other hand, the spatial structure of container port system shows different characteristic in seven port regions, such as low-level equilibrium, single-gateway, multi-gateway and so on. It is a fact that multi-gateway port region of container port system has formed in Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta region. Economic and foreign trade development, government macro-control and policy guidance, challenge of the periphery, network expansion of the terminal operators and shipping liners are the main driving forces for these new phenomena.