Eric's Beijing Diary

Got up at the crack of dawn this morning for the trip to Jingtang. I had told Elisha that I wanted to see the seaport. I am interested to see how the logistics of shipping is being handled in China. All the rest of the world together handles about a third of the containers that move through Chinese ports. The Jingtang port, about 80 kilometers from Tangshan, has been operating since 1993. It is nothing like Shanghai, of course, but it's natural harbor promises to make it an important part of China's shipping in the years to come. Quick turnaround is important, because the trade imbalance with other countries is growing. Ten years ago, only about 10 per cent of containers leaving the United States for China came back empty. Now the number stands at about 60%. Think about this. A shipping company hauls a ship load of containers out of China, and for every 100, 60 come back empty. The effect of that, of course, is that the ones that aren't empty are netting much smaller revenue on the way back to China, since the demand is so low. Some shippers are responding to this by refusing to haul cargo to China, since they can save money by going empty and moving faster. When I was in the trucking industry, it was very hard to get a load out of LA, because so much more freight went in then came out. Shippers in LA liked this, of course, because they paid a lot less for shipping than the folks back east, but it was a real loss for trucking companies. A similar situation prevailed for shippers hauling livestock. Those guys almost always came back empty. The drivers would compensate by driving faster on their return trip. Listening to bull haulers talk about the tickets they had gotten could be rather amusing. One guy told me he was doing 110 through Kansas when a cop pulled him over. This officer was very angry, and quite sarcastic. He said, "Can I see your pilot's license, since you're flying so low!?. Well, this guy happened to have a private pilot license, so he pulled it out and handed it to the officer. Now the officer was in trouble, because the pilot license was genuine. Everything was up to date. This driver was legally licensed to go "flying" through the state. The cop was at a loss for words. Finally, he said, "Well, down here on earth we're doing 55, you think you can handle that?" Can you believe this driver got out of that scrape without a ticket? I said, "I bet you slowed down." He said, "I crawled out of that state!"