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River Highway
One widely overlooked impact of the Three Gorges dam is a new route to central China.
By Craig Simons
Newsweek International
July 25-Aug. 1 issue - The Three Gorges dam wasn't built to create a river highway, and indeed none of the controversy and little of the debate that surrounded planning for the world's largest dam had anything to do with transportation. From Beijing's point of view, the main selling points of the dam were power generation and flood control, and for critics its chief downsides were environmental and social—the flooding of the gorgeous Three Gorges and thousands of villages on the banks of the fabled Yangtze River. Transport was a peripheral consideration.
But now that the dam is built, and the reservoir is slowly rising en route to its eventual western tip at Chongqing, its dramatic impact on the movement of cargo—particularly heavy products like cars—is becoming clear. The Yangtze flows deeply enough to carry heavy ships to the site of the dam, some 1,900 kilometers west of its ocean outlet at Shanghai, and the dam will allow officials to regulate the river's flow upriver from there. The reservoir will thus extend this river highway an additional 508 kilometers inland, opening the interior of China to export manufacturers year round, and positioning Chongqing to fulfill its ambitions of becoming the Detroit of China.
Many multinationals are now eyeing the Yangtze as a possible solution to the logistical nightmares of shipping inside China. Even though the length of China's highway network has doubled since 1980, it remains sparse, according to World Bank transportation specialist Michel Bellier. The problem is most acute in western China, where trucks must share local roads with bicycles and pigs, and must often pay high tolls to corrupt officials, says Christopher Torrens, director of the Shanghai office of the consulting firm Access Asia. Rail lines are worse: during the first half of last year they could meet only 35 percent of all freight requests, and companies complain that goods often arrive late or damaged.
The first movers are logistics companies themselves. Japan's Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha opened a Chongqing branch in 2003. China Merchants opened its office last December and is currently building a 70,000-square-meter warehouse. "Chong-qing," says Jiang, "is the gateway to western China, so we're confident that transportation needs will rise." Other companies, says Access Asia's Torrens, may take advantage of improved river transport by moving labor-intensive operations upstream while keeping final assembly and management in the east. "The river," he says, "could itself become a supply chain." Ford is counting on it: executives plan to increase river traffic from domestic suppliers along the river.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.