Since the strategy of “the belt and road”, China Railway Express has been enlightened one after another, and the imbalance of two-way freight has led to the accumulation of empty containers in Europe. This paper focused on sea-land container integrated transportation system between China and Europe, based on considering the factor of folding containers,   the optimization of empty container dispatch between China and Europe was studied for three scenarios, and constructed a mixed integer linear programming model with the objective of minimizing cost for each scenario. CPLEX was used to solve the problem, the influence of different factors on empty container dispatching cost in three cases was analyzed by example. Results show that sea-land intermodal transportation can greatly reduce the cost of empty container transportation, and the foldable containers can only give full play to their advantages under certain conditions, and using standard container and foldable container at the same time can better meet different needs. The optimized results can provide reference for the operation of China Railway Express.