A deep-water port began operation at Yangshan Isles of Shanghai
on Saturday.
The Yangshan Deep-water Port, a mammoth facility 27.5 kilometers
from Luchao Port in Shanghai's Nanhui District, is expected to turn
the east China metropolis into an international maritime shipping
center in the real sense.
The deep-water port is located in Shengsi County of Zhejiang
Province at the mouth of the Yangtze River, about 45 km from the
Pudong International Airport.
The port is designed to have an annual handling capacity of 25
million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) when the entire project
is completed in 2020.
The recently completed first phase of the construction has put
into operation a 1.6-kilometer long hydraulic dock with five
berths. By 2010, the dock will be extended to 11 km with around 30
births, port authorities told Xinhua.
Launching of the port has been praised by Vice Premier Huang Ju
as a "major breakthrough" in Shanghai's building of an
international maritime shipping center.
Huang visited the port Saturday and proclaimed its formal start
of operation. At the launching ceremony, he urged relevant
departments, provinces and cities to speed up port construction in
line with the plans approved by the State Council so as to ease the
country's transportation bottleneck and boost the steady and fast
growth of the national economy.
"We should speed up construction of new ports in line with the
long and medium-term plans approved by the State Council, and
further tap the potentials of existing facilities, too," he
said.
He said it's important to take full advantage of the Yangtze
waterway and better serve social and economic development of the
Yangtze River Delta, the Yangtze drainage areas and the entire
country.
Though Shanghai's name literally means "on the sea", the main
part of the city sits inland on the banks of the Huangpu River,
which runs into the Yangtze, China's longest waterway. Heavy
silting in the Yangtze Delta region has long prevented it from
serving as a deep-water port.
The idea to transform Shanghai Port into an international
shipping center was initially proposed by the Chinese government in
1996, but since the port is only seven meters deep, a new site had
to be located.
An eight-square-kilometer bonded area at the port and the
Yangshan Port Customs were also launched on Saturday.
(Xinhua News Agency December 11, 2005)
