Although the Chinese New Year holiday ended weeks ago, not all truck drivers in Shenzhen are back to work. On the expressway heading towards Yantian International Container Terminal, several trucks with no containers on their long trailers can be seen parked on the roadside, part of a static convoy that stretches nearly a kilometre.
“These are only a small portion (of all the empty trucks). The rest had to be parked in Dongguan,” said a driver surnamed Huang, referring to another city in Guangdong that is an hour drive away from Yantian – one of the biggest Chinese container ports for foreign trade.
Huang is one of the lucky drivers. He had just unloaded a container at the terminal on a Friday (Feb 17) afternoon. He said the port has more than 15,000 registered truck drivers, but only around 2,000 of them now have work.
“I feel that this year’s (export) market will be the worst,” he said. “I just heard from many factory bosses saying that their electronic products can’t be exported, as their foreign clients haven’t placed orders, and lots of factories have already moved to Southeast Asia.”
With China still trying to rev up its economic engine after three arduous years under the zero-COVID policy, the export sector – which was the main economic driver during the pandemic – is looking like it will continue to sputter amid dwindling external demand and rising geopolitical tensions, according to analysts and industry insiders.
For many truck drivers, the sluggish scene at Yantian is in stark contrast to the situation two years ago. In 2021, an empty shipping container was very hard to get, as there was so much cargo to send. But now, containers are gathering dust as they occupy every available space around the port.
“In previous years, there were no empty containers at this place,” said another driver who gave his name as Xu, pointing to a space outside Yantian’s automatic toll gate, where empty containers are piled as many as seven high, forming multicoloured stacks of corrugated steel.
“The boxes have accumulated here since the second half of last year. But now they can’t be piled any higher – the stacker crane can reach only seven storeys.”