Tag: import

Resource Imports into China 2014

With all the news and discussions about trade balance and tariffs and exports of goods from China to the U.S. we mustn’t forget that China is also a large importer of resources from all over the world.

The below Sankey diagram is a good visualization of the resource dependencies and import such as fossil fuels, minerals and ores, as well as agricultural / forestry products. I found it in an article on the Diálogo Chino blog but it was originally published in a 2016 report ‘Navigating the New Normal: China and Global Resource Governance’ by Wei Jigang et. al. published jointly by Development Research Center (DRC) of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China and The Royal Institute of International Affairs Chatham House. The image from an article ‘Will China’s new Silk Road be green?’ by Lily Pike on Diálogo Chino is republished under a Creative Commons license.

All Sankey arrows run towards China (imports in 2014) and flows are color-coded to show the resource type. There are no absolute numbers, but the value of goods imported in billions of USD is represented with a clustered scale that shows three representatives 100 bn USD, 10 bn USD, and 1 bn USD. The largest (in terms of value) stream is from the Middle East, while Latin America and Australia are the second and third largest regions delivering resources to China.

The original report is here with the image on page 64 and more detail on the data.

Incoming and outgoing cargo @ Rotterdam Port

Last weekend I had the possibility to visit a friend in the Netherlands, and we took a tour of Rotterdam Port. Despite the bad weather, I was fascinated by the huge container ships, the cranes, the noises….

Back home I did some research and came up with the cargo data for the year 2005 from the Port of Rotterdam website.

I did the following three Sankey diagrams. The first shows the inbound cargo quantities (in million tons gross weight of cargo) from the left, and the outbound quantities to the right, broken down to world regions. One can clearly see that Rotterdam handles mainly imports, with more than 281 million tons of cargo being unloaded, while only 88,2 million tons of cargo are being loaded onto ships.

Next I flipped inbound and outbound flows to the same side. However, I think that by this the diagram loses somehow, also because some purple flows (outbound to Africa and Oceania) are too thin.

In the third version, I added a shape for the balance difference between inbound and outgoing goods.

Tell me what you think about theses Sankey diagrams. It would be interesting to compare Rotterdam to other ports. Shanghai, for example, might have the opposite picture with much more exports, but I haven’t found any data yet to show this. And, if we are talking cargo traffic: how about doing a passenger Sankey diagram for one of the international airports in the U.S. (by origin/destination continent?, by airline?)