Hainan Cold Chain Resilience Paper

Abstract

As China’s only tropical island province and Free Trade Port (FTP), Hainan acts as a key hub connecting the domestic and international dual circulation. However, the natural geographical barrier of the Qiongzhou Strait has long restricted the outbound circulation of fresh agricultural products, leading to extremely high interruption risk and vulnerability of the cold chain supply chain. The traditional “channel-only” optimization paradigm is limited by the physical ceiling of distance, and can hardly fundamentally solve the problem of unsalable and supply shortage caused by typhoon-induced navigation suspension. To this end, this study introduces supply chain resilience theory, and constructs a three-dimensional analysis framework of “Institution-Channel-Facility”, aiming to explore a new breakthrough path for island-type FTPs to hedge geographical constraints. Through benchmarking with mature island FTPs such as Hong Kong and Singapore, combined with empirical research of Hainan’s “1+8+N” cold chain system, this study finds that simple channel optimization can only “secure the basic supply”, while local intensive processing-enabled facility upgrading, combined with the exclusive institutional innovation of the FTP, can effectively reduce the supply chain’s dependence on cross-sea channels. The actual data show that after the implementation of the two-wheel driven strategy, the cross-sea transportation time of our fresh products is shortened from 18 hours to 4 hours, the damage rate of goods is reduced from 12% to below 2%, the processing conversion rate is increased from 12% to 41%, and the channel dependence is greatly reduced from 100% to 15%. This discovery not only verifies the effectiveness of the three-dimensional resilience framework, but also provides a replicable Chinese experience for those island economies with similar geographical restrictions.