Constructing New Eco Water Transport

On November 3 and 4, 2016, the World Shipping Summit(2016)with the theme of“Constructing New Eco Water Transport”was held in Shanghai. He Jianzhong, the Vice Minister of Ministry of Transport attended the opening ceremony of the annual meeting and pointed out that the Chinese maritime industry will follow the requirements of“four comprehensive”strategic layout with in-depth implementation of the three strategies, actively promote maritime innovation,coordination, green, open and sharing development, and speed up the build-up of maritime power. In this context,it is necessary to analyze in-depth what is the ecological imbalance in water transport industry and how to reconstruct the new eco water transport.

The construction of new eco water transport requires the lead of ideology, such new ideology is the core value of the new era which develops together with the time. It includes three aspects:perfection, harmony, and integrity.

The perfection of water transport development. Jia Dashan had put forward perfection, one of the connotation of inland water transport development strategy as early as 2007 in Exploration of China’s water transport development strategy, and he went a step further to improve the connotation in Advantage Strategy of Inland Waterway co-authored with Ji YongBo in 2015.The so-called perfection, meaning to give full play to the comparative advantage of water transport, namely，big capacity，low land usage, low energy consumption, environment friendly. It also means the improvement of transportation safety, convenience, economy and predictability, as well as continuous reduction of impact on the environment from construction or production. It will develop towards the state of highest economic competitiveness through high-grade channel, regional network, large-scale and standardization of ships and specialization of the terminal.

The harmony of water transport development is the objective determination of the responsibility of the ship in the course of maritime transport rather than limiting the responsibility within the range acceptable to the ship, which requires great changes in maritime transport rules and United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods Wholly or Partly by Sea is such an attempt , but it still requires longtime effort; The harmony, also means the end the endless recrimination between the port and the shipowner, through the establishment of new rules and a diversified regulatory system to achieve a reconciliation of the interests of both parties, but also it means the sharing of benefits of the water transport industry by the encouragement of connecting the owners with ports through the capital ;The harmony means reconciliation between water transport industry and the economic society in fields of energy conservation, environmental protection and security emergency, also the construction of the new era of water transport security system provides safer water transportservices for the economic society supporting the country's green and peaceful development; The harmony is also a view of harmony between port and city, which is to meet the interaction and satisfy collaborative development between port and city;At last, The harmony is also a view of harmony between water transport industry and the people. It is necessary to not only meet the needs of the public for inland water transport tourism and the needs of people in remote areas, but also satisfy the high-end needs for well-off people in a prosperous society such as cruise, yacht leisure, sailing and so on.

The construction of traffic integrity system should be government-led with social synergy, and social forces participating in the construction of information systems and third-party evaluation should be placed in an important position. Third-party institutions who carry out the integrity evaluation should commend and reward enterprises with good performance and make those with poor performance public and blacklisted, and thus guiding the integrity of business operations. More importantly, the connection should be built between industry credit system and social credit system so that information islands liaise with each other, and in this way exposing industry's illegal enterprises in the community and making them have nowhere to hide or unable to move. From the perspective of enterprise practice, The new business model formed by the Internet+ Shipping industry can also play a role in this process. At present, some enterprises set up the service platform with trust deposit escrow, penalty for breach of contract and credit system. Funds are escrowed through the accounts of third party to ensure financial security. Cash flow through the platform can reduce the risk of the owner; The closed environment of the bidding process and the semidemystification of bidding information can avoid malicious competition and illegal bidding behavior; The monitoring of the whole process of waterborne logistics is conducive to elimination of dishonest behaviour.