The Hunan Provincial Water Transportation Work Conference was held on March 2, 2021. The government announced that during the “14th Five-Year Plan” period, it would invest 52 billion yuan in water transportation to comprehensively strengthen infrastructure supply, improve water transportation service guarantees, and accelerate environmentally sound “green” water transportation development. Hunan province has established a new water transportation modernization path.

Li Jianbin, Hunan Provincial Water Transportation Affairs Center director, announced that:
-Hunan government will implement high-grade arterial waterways construction during the 14th Five-Year Plan;
-It will nearly complete the “One River, One Lake, and Four Waters” waterway network construction, based on the Yangtze Golden Waterway, with the Dongting Lake as the wide extension center, and the Xiangjiang and Yuanshui Rivers as the main channels;
-The main channels will be than 2,200 kilometers long, and channels for ships of 1,000 tons displacement or more will be 1,480 kilometers;
-The coverage rate of the main channels to county-level administrative regions will increase from 29% to 55%;
-It will promote the high-level development of a multimodal transport network composed of highways, railways, and waterways which will form a port system of “one hub, multiple priorities, and wide extensions” with Yueyang Port as the hub and Changsha, Changde, Hengyang, and other key ports as the support;
-There will be more than 200 berths for ships above 1,000 tons; and,
-Hunan government will strengthen cooperation with Guizhou, Jiangxi, and other provinces to jointly promote the construction of Qingshui River and Lushui River channels.

This year, Hunan government will increase Yueyang and Changsha foreign trade route openings to create a “Hunan-Africa” container international logistics channel; promote construction of a special container railway line in the Chenglingji port area of Yueyang Port; and accelerate the preliminary work of the Hunan-Guangxi Canal to establish a new century project and open up a new channel to the sea in the west coastline.

During the 13th Five-Year period, Hunan’s water transport development shifted from volume growth to qualitative improvement. Xiangjiang National High-grade Waterway has met this standard and the 2000-ton waterway reached Hengyang. There were more than 1200 kilometers of waterways in the province above 1,000 tons, an increase of 72.73% over the prior five-year plan. Provincial ports throughput was 1.29 billion tons, an increase of 7.2% compared to last year.

This article is from Hunan Provincial Government www.enghunan.gov.cn.

Translator: Yu Jiangjiang

Chinese source: hunan.gov.cn