The Tenth Five-Year Plan of the Communications and Transportation Industry and Its Development

The long-term strategic goal for China's communications and transport development is to build an intellectual, comprehensive communications and transport system with the focus on fast transport of passengers, freights and logistics.

The targets during the 10th Five-Year Plan period (2001-2005) are to basically establish a complete communications and transport market system by way of deepening the reform; continue to strengthen overall transport capacity, further rationalize the structure and improve the quality of transport; establish a fast passenger transport system between major cities, and form a diversified and coordinate container shipping system, a bulk goods shipping system and a special-material shipping system; and make good use of information technology and network to accelerate the development of intellectual transport, promote modern logistics system development in economically developed areas.

Cargo transport mileage by various means totaled 4,630.4 billion tons/km in 2001, up 4.8 percent over the previous year. Included were 1,457.5 billion tons/km by railway, up 6.7 percent; 618 billion tons/km by highway, up 0.8 percent; 2,486 billion tons/km by water, up 4.7 percent; and 4.4 billion tons/km by air, up 3.8 percent. The passenger traffic mileage amounted to 1,300 billion people/km in 2001, up 6.0 percent. Included were 476.7 billion people/km by railway, up 5.2 percent; 704.7 billion people/km by highway, up 5.8 percent; 9.5 billion people/km by water, a drop of 5.6 percent; and 109.1 billion people/km by air, up 12.5 percent. The throughput of China's ports came to 2.4 billion tons, up 8.8 percent, including 600 million tons of foreign trade goods, up 13.6 percent.

Basic problems in China's communications and transport business include deficient aggregate of transport network, uneven regional development and small scale of communications and transport infrastructural facilities in general. In line with the transport network density in terms of territory and population, China has only 1,344.48 kilometers/10,000 square kilometers and 10.43 kilometers/10,000 people, far behind economically developed countries.

At present, China has 460 rural towns and more than 70,000 administrative villages inaccessible to highway. China's regional structure of communications and transport facilities is irrational. The eastern areas are comparatively developed and the central and west regions are backward with transport network density accounting for only one third of the country's average level. The vast rural areas, in particular, are provided with poor communications conditions and low-grade roads thus severely limiting the development of rural economy.

Although China has obtained remarkable achievements in communications infrastructural facilities, there are obvious differences in the eastern, central and west regions in view of the local distribution. One example is expressways, which stretch 10,878 kilometers in the east, accounting for 56 percent of the country's total, 5,014 kilometers in the central part, accounting for 25.8 percent, and 3,545 kilometers in the west, accounting for only 18.2 percent.

The overall technology level of China's communications and transport hardware facilities is very low, and the rate of multitrack railways and electrification is not high. The automation of high-speed passenger transport and operational management is still in its beginning stage. About 90 percent of its highways are under the third grade highway standard.

The proportion of inland river navigation channels able to accommodate ships under 300 DWT accounts for only 19.3 percent. Port loading and unloading equipment is backward, the civil aviation management and telecommunication navigation technology is poor and overall management level is low.

The country's communications and transport software development is also behind the time. At present, foreign cargo transport service has hooked up the whole process of modern logistics. However, the lack of transport information, transfer connection of transport, passenger and cargo agency mechanism and overall development of service employees has kept China to stay at a position of offering simple transport services in cargo shipping.

The process of transport marketization is slow. On the one hand, the situation of stagnant reform of communications and transport system, barriers between different regions and between different departments and failure to separate the function of government from those of enterprises still exist and affected the development of a complete overall transport system.

On the other hand, the transport sector has not yet formed a strong production scale and carried out network operation. The current backward telecommunication and management of transport enterprises means have resulted in low efficiency. Some transport services are still monopolized by large and medium-sized transport enterprises. The overlap of market functions by different transport means and unreasonable labor distribution has hampered different types of transport enterprises to perform their own advantages. The department management system by different means of transportation has affected the coordinate development of communication and transport business.

The development of communications and transport laws and regulations also needs more efforts. China has not yet formed a legal system for communications and is short of some important laws and regulations. The published transport laws and regulations has not been brought into full implementation and are not in line with those from economically developed countries and international conventions.

[Source: Ministry of Communications]

(For more biz stories, please visit Industry Updates)