China Inside Out by Bill Dodson

Author:Bill Dodson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-01-20T05:00:00+00:00

THE ARTERIES OF A NATION

The flood of funds into the development of China’s transportation infrastructure accelerated a master plan to develop regions outside the Yangtze and Pearl River Deltas that had been on the drawing boards of central government and local administrations since the beginning of the twenty-first century. China’s leadership had been for some time aware that the country would need to invest heavily in roads, rail, air, and water ways to modernize the poorer parts of China. Transportation infrastructure, in particular, was the key to enticing investment into neglected regions and to giving locals the opportunities they needed to take jobs and build businesses in their otherwise isolated hometowns. One of the cities most isolated from the east coast throughout China’s economic boom was Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province.

Kunming is tucked in a mountain plateau with an average year-round temperature of a pleasant 24 degrees centigrade. Established more than 2,000 years before as an entrepôt for the portion of the Silk Road running through Burma and India, Kunming came back on the central committee’s radar in 2007 as the future logistics and distribution center for goods traveling across China into Southeast Asia. Kunming became a prime target for an infrastructure makeover on a scale and pace that would see the city realize the economic vibrancy of its east coast cousins within a handful of years.

Kunming’s main airport, originally built in 1923 and expanded multiple times, was small, worn, and congested with travelers when I first visited the city in 2007. Departures for many flights required passengers to descend dark, worn staircases with heavily scuffed walls to the ground floor of the airport, where the ceilings were low and the smell of jet fuel so strong in the lobby that I had to gasp for breath a minute at a time. In 2008, Kunming began building an international airport, which aims to become China’s fourth-largest hub (after Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou) and one of the world’s top 80 airports in terms of the number of flights as well as passenger capacity and cargo handling by 2020. A light-rail network spidering the municipality would tie the airport to the downtown by 2015. The local government plans to have the first phase of the airport complete by the end of 2011. The Kunming airport project is just one of 15 airport-construction projects the Yunnan government plans on launching in the province. The airports will create an international transport network supporting the transshipment of goods from North Korea, Japan, and the interior of China into Southeast Asia.

The development of Yunnan’s air network is part of a national effort to advance air travel throughout the country. In 2008, China planned to spend US$62.5 billion on building 97 new regional airports by 2020. Chinese planners also received orders to expand 73 airports and to relocate 11 more hubs. Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region planned an increase in the number of its airports to 20 from 16 in 2010. Meanwhile, north China’s Inner

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