The situation a shanghai is paradoxical and dramatic: the lockdown imposed on the city, blocking 26 million citizens at home, is also causing a huge traffic jam Ships waiting to be loaded and others waiting to be unloaded, risking a ripple effect that slows global supply chains. The Chinese megalopolis is indeed the main hub of the container shipping planet, but the port’s activity is at risk of total paralysis due to staff shortages and crazy but so strict health regulations even during the first wave of the pandemic.
The numbers of the naval blockade
All the cargo ships blocked near the port have hit 500 in the past few days, now they are 477 as calculated by the Bloomberg website. An incredible number that will remain stable or rise again if the government does not act as soon as possible. As Il Corriere explains, the impact on all global supply chains is enormous: from technology to food, part of every commercial sector is watching with concern what is happening there. On the occasion of the 2021 lockdown, the “line” of ships blocked in Shanghai never exceeded 200: today it is more than double and for a variant not as bad as the first covid was. Chinese follies.
The importance of Shanghai
According to shipowners and traders, the shortage of dockers in Shanghai is slowing delivery of the necessary documents to ships to unload cargo. Meanwhile, ships carrying metals such as copper and iron ore are left at sea as trucks cannot transport goods from the port to the processing plants. A part of it traffic jam It is spreading to other ports, with ships being diverted further north to the ports of Qingdao and Tianjin, where truck services have not been as badly affected. 54 ships were waiting in Tianjin on April 11, an increase of 29% in one month. Congestion was lighter in Hebei and Liaoning provinces, where road traffic was also hampered by mandatory mass testing of truck drivers and workers in March and April. More than 4 million tons of cargo pass through Shanghai, the world’s largest commercial port, every year.
The three negative events
A negative chain of events slowed things down enormously Traffic Container planetarium: Covid, greater world demand and the war in Ukraine have caused prices to skyrocket, prices have increased by 400500% compared to 2019. Now, however, it is Chinese madness that is paralyzing those passing through Shanghai with a mindless lockdown a very contagious but not very deadly variant. The anger among the citizens is enormous, as shown by many videos distributed on social networks. But the lack of staple foods in some parts of the city, fueled by the serious problems in the logistics industry, are also having a negative impact. Supermarkets and grocery stores are being besieged by hungry people, drones are flying over neighborhoods warning citizens not to leave their homes, and even robotic dogs roaming the streets saying to stay within their walls: this is the weird everyday the Chinese metropolis.