Comparative Analysis of the Shipping Center Competitiveness of Major Port Cities in China

With the development of the Chinese economy, many port cities aim to establish shipping centers. Due to the status of international routes, the scope of the hinterland, the economic development level, the conditions of individual cities, and other factors, different international shipping centers adopt different development strategies. To identify the advantages and disadvantages of individual shipping centers and reasonably determine their relative competitiveness, it is important to establish a competitiveness evaluation index system suitable for evaluating the characteristics of shipping centers. Hierarchical analysis, principal component analysis, and cluster analysis are applied to classify the Chinese shipping centers of main port cities such as Shanghai, Nanjing, Tianjin, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Dalian, Chongqing, and Qingdao. Our method ranks the cities according to both their soft and hard environments to analyze the main influencing factors, as well as establish a corresponding shipping center competitiveness evaluation index system.