Waterways Of The Future

Inland Waterways Are Transforming China’s Hinterland. The Next Step—a Mega Port Linking the Three Gorges Dam to Europe and the Indian Ocean

- Ananth Krishnan

ON A RECENT MISTY MORNING, a long line of freighters carrying automobiles and heavy machinery slowly snaked their way along a bend of the Yangtze river in southwestern China. Out of the fog, a towering 185 metre concrete edifice— the world’s largest dam at the Three Gorges—appeared to block their path. Then, the magic happened: a gush of water followed by a slow, cranking sound, as the freighters slowly defied gravity and rose out of the water on a massive shiplift. Within an hour, the ships from Shanghai scaled the heights of the Three Gorges Dam, and continued onward up the Yangtze to a sprawling port in Chongqing, the biggest port in China’s heartland. From Chongqing, the goods are offloaded onto trains that run to Germany and to trucks that travel a highway south to Kunming. Plans are underfoot to link Kunming by expressway and rail to Singapore in the south and to the Bay of Bengal port of Kyaukpyu in Myanmar in the west, with the hope of transforming landlocked interior China into an unlikely centre for regional trade.

The Three Gorges Dam at Yichang and the upstream port at Chongqing are at the heart of China’s plan to revive its inland waterways. China already leads the world in water freight traffic, which accounts for 8.7 percent of total freight compared with 0.5 percent in India, according to a 2017 World Bank report. Traffic volumes are now set to grow even further. Until a few years ago, the shallow upper reaches of the Yangtze were out of bounds for freighters, until the completion of the construction of the mammoth Three Gorges Dam.