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China's global shipping connectivity had been somewhat overlooked as the bulk of related studies predominantly focused on the throughput volume of its own port cities. This article tackles such lacunae by providing a relational perspective based on the extraction of vessel movement archives from the Lloyd's List corpus. Two complementary analyses are proposed: long-term dynamics with all ships included (1890-2008) and medium-term dynamics focusing on container flows (1978-2016). Each analysis examines China's maritime connectivity in various ways and on different spatial scales, from the global to the local, in terms of concentration, vulnerability, and expansion. The main results underline the influence of technological, economic, and political factors on the changing distribution of connectivity internally and externally. In particular, China has managed to reduce its dependence upon external transit hubs, to increase the internal connectivity of its own port system, and to strengthen its dominance towards an increasing number of foreign nodes and trade partners through the maritime network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China with the implement of the strategy of overall opening up to the outside world, northeast China has basically formed an open pattern with simultineous development of border opening and coast opening. As a national window to open up to the outside world, an open port system in northeast region has formed. These ports can be classified from different angles, such as management level, transport mode, location. From management level, they can be classified into the state first-class ports and the second-class ports. According to transpost mode, they can be divided into railway port, highway port, water transport port, air transport port and special mode port, and based on location, they can be divided into border port, coast port and inland port. The paper introduces in detail the foreign trade connection of 4 most representative state first-class border ports: Hunchun, Suifenhe, Heihe and Manzhouli. The open ports of northeast coast region mean mainly coast water transport ports in Liaodong Peninsula. The foreign trade connection of coast open ports: Dandong, Jinzhou, Yinkou and Dalian is expounded. And the paper also analyses the transport connection of ports of northeast region with their hinterlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]