The 94-km-long expressway which forms part of the national trunk linking northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region with Qingdao, a coastal city in east China, opened to traffic Friday.

It means that the famous 2,000-year-old Silk Road now has a new outlet to China's eastern coast.

The new expressway starts from Guyaozi and terminates in Wangjuanliang, both located in Ningxia, through which the ancient Silk Road passed. The expressway, built up to international standards, costs 1.1 billion yuan, the lowest price in the history of China's expressway construction.

Upon completion, the expressway will allow coal to be transported to eastern China from eastern Ningxia and Shanxi Province and natural gas from Shaanxi Province or enable them to be exported via the Yellow Sea. It will facilitate economic growth in northwest China and promote cooperation between eastern and western China, said Zhang Chunxian, vice minister of Communications.

The Silk Road, starting from Chang'an (now Xi'an), the capital during the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-24 AD), was the most important commercial route linking prosperous central China with central Asia 2,000 years ago. Lanzhou, Turpan, Dunhuang, Loulan (Kroraina), Lingwu and about 20 other cities prospered because of the 7,000-km Silk Road.

Today however western China lags behind other Chinese cities in infrastructure construction. The density of highway and railway roads in western China is only half of the national average and one fifth of that in coastal areas.

Under China's national strategy of speeding up development of the western region, plans for large scale road construction were unveiled last year.

The central government will earmark 700-800 billion yuan to build highways to a total length of 350,000 km in western China over the next 10 years, Communications Minister Huang Zhendong said.

Work on eight inter-provincial roads commenced this year. Funds pooled by 12 provinces and regions in western China totaled 28.2 billion yuan in the first seven months of this year, up 24 percent over the same period last year.

By 2010, construction of nine national trunk roads in the west are scheduled to be completed. All major cities in the region will be connected by expressways.

Shaanxi Province is to invest 36.6 billion yuan in highway building over the next five years to bring its total highway mileage to 48,000 km. Gansu Province will allocate 40 billion yuan to upgrade existing roads.

The amount to be spent on highway projects in Ningxia over the next five years is to top 19.5 billion yuan, tripling the amount of the previous five years.

There has been an upsurge in planned expressway construction in the last couple of years. Tremendous progress has been made in the construction of expressways between Lianyungang in east China's Jiangsu Province and Helgus Port in Xinjiang and between Shanghai, China's leading industrial center, and Chengdu, a leading metropolis in southwest China.

New roads make it easy for western China to keep contact with other parts of China. It now takes only 14 hours to travel from Yinchuan, capital of Ningxia, to Qingdao.

(People's Daily 09/29/2001)