By Yuling Chen, EDITOR

On the evening of March 10 during China's two sessions, China Unicom headquarters in Beijing, capital of China, witnessed a dialogue about the Yangtze River with delegates from three national central cities.

The Yangtze River Dialogue invites delegates from three of China's central cities to the show on March 10, 2019. (Photo by Wan Nan)

Over five hours from western China to eastern China by high-speed railway by 2025

They are deputies to the NPC and members of the National Committee of CPPCC from the Yangtze River’s upper, middle, and lower reaches. Wang Jiguang is a member of the National Committee of CPPCC from Chongqing. He is also Deputy Secretary General of the CPPCC of Chongqing Municipal Committee. Xu Xudong is a member of the National Committee of CPPCC from Wuhan. He also serves as Deputy Director of the Institute of Hydrobiology (IHB), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Zhang Zhao’an is a deputy to the NPC from Shanghai and Vice President of Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

In the dialogue about the Yangtze River, the three delegates revealed an exciting piece of news. The construction of the Shanghai-Wuhan-Chengdu High-Speed Railway will begin this year and be completed by 2025. By then, it will only take a little more than 5 hours to travel between Chongqing and Shanghai.

The Yangtze River (Photo by Yuan Tieli)

A new pattern of all-round opening-up

Wang Jiguang said that the Golden Waterway of the Yangtze River was now mature enough to be the main axis. The comprehensive transport channel should be supported.

Chongqing should ensure the unimpeded and efficient operation of trunk waterways of the Yangtze River. On this basis, it should comprehensively build the Shanghai-Wuhan-Chengdu High-Speed Railway and national expressways. Therefore, it can construct the framework of the rail transit network of the three major urban agglomerations along the Yangtze River.

He also proposed that major ports along the Yangtze River should be nodes and hubs. With these ports, Chongqing should promote the development of a collecting, distributing and transporting system. The system should cover water, rail, highway, aviation, and oil and gas pipeline networks. It needs to build a comprehensive and three-dimensional transportation corridor that is network-shaped, standardized, and intelligent. It should also connect the corridor with the Silk Road Economic Belt which relies on the Eurasian Land Bridge. In this way, it can create a new pattern of all-round opening-up in the coastal, riverside, border and inland areas.

Source: Chongqing Daily