Resilience improvement strategies: an inevitable choice for the sustainable development of China’s ports along the New Maritime Silk Road

As key nodes of the New Maritime Silk Road, enhancing port resilience is essential to ensure the stable operation of ports. It is also a crucial measure to achieve coordinated development between ports and cities and to promote the shared prosperity of regions along the New Maritime Silk Road. Currently, ports along this route lack sufficient resilience, facing challenges such as an unreasonable industrial structure, inadequate institutional adjustments, and fragmented supply chains—issues evident in organizational, institutional, and supply chain resilience assessments—that require urgent resolution. Based on a comprehensive analysis of internal motivations, external conditions for improving port resilience, and the temporal and spatial evolution trends of port centers, the author proposes a mechanism to enhance the resilience of China’s ports along the New Maritime Silk Road. This mechanism includes optimizing the industrial structure through collaborative efforts between ports and cities; adjusting port systems; establishing an international consultation, cooperation, and early warning mechanism to support sustainable port development; strengthening strategic cooperation among ports to implement a development model based on internal and external circulation; and enhancing the construction of both port software and hardware infrastructure. These measures aim to improve the resilience of ports along the New Maritime Silk Road, promote coordinated development along the route, achieve shared prosperity, and ultimately realize the sustainable development and regional integration of the New Maritime Silk Road.