China to invest $725 bn in transportation projects

The Dollar Business Bureau

China will invest 4 trillion yuan (around $725 billion) to improve its rural transportation projects. The country will spend this huge amount on 300 new projects that will offer good transportation facilities to remote areas where more than 70 million poor people reside. This is a part of the three-year plan of the country to remove poverty by 2020, as reported by China Radio International.

Zheng Jian with the National Development and Reform Commission said that the country has planned such a huge spending plan with an aim to bring all the people in China above the poverty line by 2020. Access to good transportation is an essential factor that helps people in coming out of poverty. Therefore, China has included construction of rural roads and rail network in its new plan to connect remote areas to regional hubs in the coming three years, he said. 

China’s uneven topography, mostly in the southern and southwest regions, has kept several communities isolated from other developing parts of the country. People living in these areas have remained at the bottom of the growth story due to limited access to support and other amenities from the government.

The rural transportation plan includes projects that create enhanced connectivity in major urban centres, inter-city linking roads in the Yangtze and Pearl River Deltas, and also in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.

As per the official records of China, around 600 million people have been uplifted from below the poverty line over the past three decades. Other than this, China has 70.17 million people in the rural areas living below the poverty line. The Chinese government has set targets to uplift them above the poverty line by 2020.