An old Cantonese saying goes: "Lu Tong, Cai Tong", which means a region more easily becomes rich if it has advanced road network to link it to the outside.
He Zhongyou, director-general of Guangdong provincial bureau of communications, knows the proverb very well.
To further improve the province's highway network, He's bureau plans to invest more than 647.2 billion yuan in 71 projects to further upgrade transport facilities in the coming five years to better serve Guangdong's rapid economic growth,
According to He, the south China province is expected to have expressways with a total length of more than 5,500 km by the end of 2012, forming an advanced expressway network that helps connect the prosperous province with the other parts in the mainland and neighboring Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions.
Seventeen of the expressways link Guangdong to bordering Jiangxi, Hunan and Fujian provinces and the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, He said.
The expressway network is certain to help boost Guangdong's further development, He added.
To this end, top priorities will be given to construction of the new Guangzhou-Shenzhen Expressway along the eastern bank of the Pearl River, the second phase of a new Guangzhou-Zhuhai Expressway, Guangzhou-Wuzhou Expressway and Guangzhou-Hezhou Expressway, linking Guangzhou to the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, He told a recent work conference in Guangzhou, capital of the province.
Meanwhile, the Shaoguan-Ganzhou and Foshan-Kaiping expressways will also be expanded, He added.
Guangdong has achieved rapid progress in expressway construction since its first expressway - Guangzhou-Foshan Expressway - opened to traffic in 1989.
Guangdong's expressway length ranked the third in the mainland in 2001 and was second between 2002 and 2005.
But the province's expressway construction has lagged behind its growth in recent years.
One of the country's economic powerhouses, Guangdong ranked only fourth in total expressway length on the mainland by the end of last year, when it had 3,520 km of expressways, trailing Henan, Shandong and Jiangsu provinces, with expressways of 4,556 km, 4,033 km and 3,608 km respectively.
And the province's expressway density ranked the eighth on the mainland at the end of 2007.
Last year, Guangdong invested a total of 50 billion yuan in building its transport facilities, up 13.45 percent year-on-year. New expressways with a total length of more than 200 km were built in 2007.
In addition to construction of expressways and highways, the province will expand investment in port construction. Guangdong plans to have 279 deepwater berths in 2012.
The throughput of ports in Guangdong reached more than 800 million tons last year, up 13.91 percent from 2006 and ranking first on the Chinese mainland.
Source: China Daily
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