中欧班列的发展与中日“第三方市场”合作

Abstract

Under the “Belt and Road” initiative, China-Europe Railway Express has grown into a new project for the connectivity construction in the Eurasia continent. Since the early 2010s, the Chinese government has substantially increased the use of the China-Europe Railway Express for cooperation on logistics and transportation in recent years. In the meantime, the Sino-Japanese relations have revealed certain signs of resilience, despite Japan remaining relunctant to participate into the China-led “Belt and Road” initiative. Along with former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s visit to China in 2018, the two governments and private sectors worked out a nascent “third-party market” cooperation initiative, with the aim of facilitating business and industrial cooperation in other developing countries. In this context, the China-Europe Railway Express has become a pilot program that can generate substantial demonstration effects to the future of the “third-party market” cooperation mechanism between China and Japan. Nowadays, increasing Japanese logistics enterprises have utilized the China-Europe Railway Express, and developed the “air-rail” and “sea-rail” models to deliver its goods from Japan to Euroasia countries. The use of China-Europe Railway Express can largely reduce the time and costs compared with conventional ways of air and sea transportations, and thus appears to be favorable by Japan’s private sectors. This study sees the China-Europe Railway Express as a flagship project for the emerging Sino-Japanese “third-party market” cooperation, and also conducts a number of case studies to see its merits and advantages. Furthermore, this paper concludes by discussing the future prospect of Sino-Japanese “third-party market” cooperation and tries to raise some policy recommendations.