Shanghai Daily
February 23, 2001

China’s ‘golden waterway’ is crowded by too many bridges that hamper the passage of big ships, the head of the Yangtze shipping authority says.

The Yangtze River, China’s "golden waterway," is crowded by too many bridges that hamper passage of big ships, said the head of the Yangtze shipping authority. Construction of "too many" bridges may block large oceangoing ships from sailing directly to inland cities along the river, said Jin Yihua, director of the Yangtze River Shipping Administration. He said bridges would number 124 by 2020 and said those bridges too low for big ships should be reconstructed. The Yangtze will see rising shipping business when the costs of land transport rise due to an energy shortage, said Jin. The Yangtze is China’s longest river, and 795 million tons of cargo were shipped through the trunk in 2005. It is a major shipping artery connecting eastern, central and western China. Jin denounced the craze for building "Yangtze bridges." He said that since the first bridge across the Yangtze was open to traffic, 39 bridges have been erected, and the number is expected to reach 124 by 2020. "This means one bridge in less than 30 kilometers across the nearly 3,000-kilometer-long trunk of the river by that time," said Jin. Moreover, some of the existing bridges have height and span problems affecting large ships. He said cities along the river usually employ ships of over 5,000 deadweight tons for direct shipping to Japan, above 7,000 deadweight tons to Southeast Asia and above 10,000 deadweight tons to Europe and America. Although more than 10,000 international ships entered the Yangtze waterway in 2001, 99 percent of them only went to ports below the Nanjing section on the lower reaches, said Jin. He urged local authorities to build more tunnels under the river than bridges over it when they make plans to handle road traffic. Jin urged a minimum distance of more than 80 kilometers between bridges on the middle and upper reaches of the trunk, beginning at Wuhan. Downstream, the minimum distance between bridges should be over 100 kilometers, he said.