Abstract:Various statistical analyses were conducted todetermine the relationship between economic indicators for Chinese provincesand railway freight volume. The results indicated that southeastern coastalareas such as Shanghai and Guangzhou received foreign capital andexperienced rapid economic growth in secondary and tertiary industries. On theone hand, railway freight transport is centered on coal production regions likeDongbei and Huahei. In addition, a cluster analysis was performed on thedistribution ratio classified by destination province for the railway freightvolume from each province. The results indicate that Chinaas a whole can be dividedinto seven railway freight transport zones such that the freight distributionratios for destination provinces are similar for neighboring provinces.

Keywords: railway freight transport, coal, clusteranalysis, transport zone, China

Introduction

Along with the remarkable economic growth achieved in recent years,modernization of logistics seems to be rapidly progressing in China.However,itis difficult to say that statistics on China’s logistics are sufficientlycomplete. For statistics on freight volumes between regions, only railwaystatistics are aggregated and published. Thus in this paper, with thesestatistics as fundamental data, we want to clarify the regional structure of China’s railwayfreight transport.

One of the most interesting research topics in geography is theanalysis of spatial structure for freight transport. Ullrnan (1957), Knudsen(1985), Berry(1966), Wallace (1967), Mitsuhashi (1978), Kanno (1976), Murayama (1984, 1990),and Han (1981) have already elucidated the spatial structure for freighttransport for various nations. These studies obtained figures in the form ofdetailed origin-destination matrices for various industrial sectors and freighttypes, and also obtained splendid analytical results through trial applicationsof spatial interaction models and multivariate analysis.

However, there has been a lag in the preparation of statistics onregional economy, transportation, and goods distribution in response to recentrapid economic development in China.For example, there are no statistics on interregional automobile-based freighttransport. As for water-based transportation, origin-destination matricesdifferentiated by article transported, have not been tabulated. The onlystatistics on inter-regional freight transport volume published and obtainablefor Chinaare in the annually published Year Book of China Transportation and Communications(Year Book House of China Transportation and Communications 2004). The bookconsists solely of inter-regional freight transport volume statistics(origin-destination matrices) for the China National Railway.