Transport facilities dominate to-do list for future growth
Zhanjiang is going all out to develop itself into a national transportation hub, said local officials.
Zhanjiang Party chief Zheng Renhao said the existing transport facilities have become bottleneck for Zhanjiang’s economic growth and the city government should take steps to improve the city’s infrastructure, a major production base in Guangdong’s Leizhou Peninsula.
“The Guangdong provincial government also attaches great importance to improving the transport facilities in Zhanjiang and has promised to fully support the city’s infrastructure construction in terms of policies and funding,” Zheng said.
He urged relevant departments in the city to seize the golden opportunities of the Belt and Road Initiative to accelerate construction of the city’s major traffic projects in the coming years.
To this end, Zheng and Jiang Jianjun, mayor of Zhanjiang, recently led working groups to visit the Guangdong Department of Communications, Guangdong Railway Group and Guangdong Airport Authority to seek further cooperation to boost construction of Zhanjiang’s transport projects.
According to city authorities, construction of a new airport will officially kick off in October.
The new airport, located in Wuchuan, will serve Zhanjiang and neighboring cities of Maoming and Yangjiang in the western part of Guangdong, as well as nearby cities in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.
The airport, which will cost 4.72 billion yuan ($684 million), will be able to serve 4.2 million passengers annually by 2025.
The airport will include a 2,800-meter-long and 45-meterwide runway, a terminal with floor space of more than 58,000 square meters and related facilities.
Guangdong Railway Group has promised to build a new highspeed railway to link the new airport to the city’s railway network.
At least five high-speed railway projects are being planned and constructed to help connect Zhanjiang with other cities in the country.
Of them, the Guangzhou-Zhanjiang section of the ZhanjiangShenzhen high-speed railway is expected to be completed and operational in June 2018. Construction of several expressways is underway in Zhanjiang to link the city to other parts of the country.
The Shantou-Zhanjiang expressway is expected to be operational before the end of the year, while construction of the ChongqingZhanjiang expressway is expected to begin in August and open to traffic Zheng Renhao, Party chief of Zhanjiang before the end of 2019. More than 30 percent of the investment for the Xuwen Port section of the Zhanjiang-Xuwen expressway has been completed so far.
Expansion of Zhanjiang Port will also be accelerated. Reconstruction of a 300,000-metric-ton ocean channel is expected to start before the end of the year.
A number of container terminals are also being planned, aiming to build Zhanjiang into a major import and export harbor in the western part of Guangdong.
Zhanjiang Port is expected to become one of the major oceangoing channels for the western part of Guangdong, Guangxi and the vast Southwest China region.
Zhanjiang Port has opened dozens of international ocean routes to connect the city with major ports around the world. will be invested in Zhanjiang’s new airport