Dynamic resilience of China-Europe container maritime supply chains: data-driven measurement and configurational mechanisms
Abstract
Against growing global supply chain uncertainty and mandatory decarbonization regulations issued by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), China–Europe container maritime supply chains (CMSC) face continuous disruptions triggered by geopolitical conflicts, publichealth emergencies and trade frictions. Existing resilience studies are limited by ambiguous dimension classification and overreliance on static evaluation, and few datadriven assessment tools can simultaneously support risk governance and lowcarbon transition for sustainable shipping. This research addresses this research gap by establishing a coupled “capabilities–domains” framework for dynamic resilience evaluation of CMSC and forming a 12indicator system covering four resilience capabilities and three marketport domains. Drawing on multisource heterogeneous maritime data including AIS vessel tracks and customs records, we integrate dynamic game weighting, grey relational analysis and TOPSIS to quantify CMSC resilience under four global shocks: the China–US Trade War, COVID19 pandemic, Russia–Ukraine conflict and Red Sea crisis, and the fsQCA method is further applied to identify configurational influence pathways. The overall resilience of CMSC presents an invertedU trend, rising first and then falling, with the peak observed during the RussiaUkraine conflict; resilience decreases by 2% in the Red Sea crisis, yet remains 13.4% higher than the level in the trade war period. Resistance (0.414) serves as the dominant capability in the trade war, recovery (0.510) reaches its maximum during the RussiaUkraine conflict, and adaptation and transformation capacities develop in tandem under lowcarbon pressure in the Red Sea crisis. Four distinct pathways for resilience enhancement are identified, among which the pathway of “recoverytransformation dualdrive under insufficient resistance” best explains the sustainable development of shipping systems. This study overcomes the drawbacks of conventional static resilience analysis, and the findings can support targeted riskcontrol strategies for CMSC amid global emergencies and provide theoretical references for lowcarbon and resilient maritime supply chain management.