China's first expressway, the Shenyang-Dalian expressway, has been extended and opened to traffic on Sunday.

Wu Bangguo, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, and officials from the State Council, or the central Chinese government, and the Liaoning provincial government attended the ceremony for the official operation of the new expressway.

Linking Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning Province, and Dalian, a coastal city on the tip of the Liaodong peninsular, the expanded expressway runs for 348 km from Jinbaotai of Shenyang city to Houyan of Dalian. And the expansion project was completed in 27 months at a cost of 7.2 billion yuan (US$ 870 million).

The two-way eight-laned expressway will allow the passage of vehicles running at a speed of 120 km per hour.

Construction of the old Shenyang-Dalian expressway, which began in 1984, and opened to traffic in 1990. The two-way, four-laned expressway was the first expressway ever built in China.

In tandem with the completion of the new Shenyang-Dalian expressway, Liaoning province would kick off a new round construction of expressways, noted Zhang Gongxian, deputy director of the Liaoning Provincial Bureau of Communications.

Liaoning plans to build 2,021 km of expressways and upgrade 550km of existing expressways within the next 15 years, Zhang added.

Currently, Liaoning has a total of 1,637 km of expressways open to traffic, ranking the fourth in the country only next to eastern Shandong and Jiangsu provinces and south China's Guangdong province.

By the end of last year, the total length of China's expressways open to traffic had amounted to approximately 30,000 km, the second only to that of the United States.

(Xinhua News Agency August 29, 2004)