Chinese ports, a barometer for foreign trade, have been scrambling to beat the rapidly increase in foreign trade goods amid COVID-19 pandemic, performing better than expected and creating new records in many aspects.

At the Qianwan Container Terminal, the port of Qingdao, a dozen foreign trade vessels are loading or unloading containers and that is normal, to Zhang Jun, deputy general manager of the terminal.

"That began to become new normal from the second half of last year. We added 20 more new routes during the period, including 14 dedicated to foreign trade," said Zhang.

Zhang told CCTV that due to the pandemic, a large number of shipping companies abandoned some of their shipping routes or cut the number of liners starting from the first quarter of last year. But after the government implemented a series of policies to stabilize foreign trade and the local enterprises gradually resumed operation, the Qingdao Port, a hub for handling foreign trade goods in north China, began to feel the recovery of foreign trade.

According to port officials, due to the pandemic, a large amount of containers were blocked in foreign ports, causing bottleneck in exports.

"That is the shipping bottleneck. Domestic ports and shipping companies all lacked containers," said Chen Xiaofei, deputy general manager of the Honge Group, a local steel plates company.

In order to ease the export logistic difficulties, The Shandong Port Land-Sea International Logistics Group came out with a transport scheme by taking advantage of its platform to connect up railways, shipping companies and freight forward companies.

"When containers were in acute shortage, we cooperated with globally large shipping companies to extend the turnover time of containers by one or two days and then deliver shipping containers to Liaocheng area to be hauled by train to Huangdao and direct to ports," said Wang Jin, head of the Multi-modal Transport Division with the Shandong Port Land-Sea International Logistics Group.

The Shandong Port Group put through 1.42 billion tons of goods in 2020, 7.5 percent over than in 2019.