China Completes a New River-to-Sea Corridor in Southwest China

　　In an era of prosperity, a canal is built; Pinglu opens a thoroughfare. At 10:25 on September 16, as the whistle of the maiden voyage ship sounded at the Madao hub in Qinzhou, Guangxi, the first river-to-sea canal project coordinated at the national level since the founding of New China--the Pinglu Canal--was officially opened to navigation. As a backbone project of the New Western Land-Sea Corridor and a landmark project for accelerating the building of a transportation powerhouse, the Pinglu Canal has opened the shortest water transport corridor from Southwest China to ASEAN.

　　From the Pingtang River mouth in Hengzhou, Nanning, to the Beibu Gulf International Hub Seaport, this 134.2-kilometer canal is built to Inland Waterway Class I standards, can accommodate 5,000-tonne vessels, and is the highest-grade navigable canal in China, ending Guangxi's history of "being coastal yet having no river that flows into the sea."

　　The canal has a total water-level drop of 65 meters along its route. Three cascade hubs—Madao, Qishi, and Qingnian—were built to allow ships to rise and fall level by level like "climbing stairs." Their "golden value" is mainly reflected in--safety, water saving, and time saving.

　　The Madao and Qishi hubs both adopt a world-first three-stage water-saving basin superimposed layout, with a water-saving rate of more than 60%. The three major hubs save more than 1 billion cubic meters of water annually, equivalent to about 70 times the water storage capacity of West Lake. Discharging water level by level means lock-passing efficiency would decrease. The canal team pioneered a "maze-type buffer sleeve" hydraulic opening and closing technology. The working valves at the Madao and Qishi hubs achieved "Chinese speed": opening takes only 1 minute, and closing only 30 seconds.

　　With an investment of 72.7 billion yuan, 315 million cubic meters of earth and rock excavated, and 27 main bridges across the canal built... Since construction began in August 2022, more than 20,000 builders have cut through mountains and tamed waters, creating one world-first and four world records, and striving to build a high-quality, green, and clean project. "The Pinglu Canal demonstrates to the world China's engineering miracle of self-reliance and the confidence of a major country," said Yuan Heping, planning and construction engineer of the Pinglu Canal Project.

　　As the magnificent long river flows through mountains, rivers, and seas, an invisible "digital canal" is also growing synchronously in the cloud. The Pinglu Canal is China's first full-lifecycle smart canal. Along the entire route, a monitoring system based on BeiDou, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence is deployed, realizing one-map overview, one-brain intelligent control, and one-click access.

　　With green as the foundation, this century project coexists harmoniously with nature. Photovoltaics are built alongside the ship locks, generating 4.457 million kWh annually and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 2,297 tonnes per year; the three-dimensional ecological system—fishways underwater, purification in the water, green corridors on the banks, and bird paths in the air—is the modern canal's goodwill toward nature and its responsibility to the future.

　　In tandem with navigation, the canal's operating rules and support systems have been implemented as a whole: the Regulations on the Protection and Management of the Pinglu Canal were issued, clarifying in legal form the protection of the canal waterway, navigation management, ecological protection, and the responsibilities of all parties; the Guangxi water transport river-sea integration smart dispatch platform was launched for trial operation, enabling the "smart canal" to achieve one-time cargo declaration and through-passage along the entire route; the Provisions on Navigation Safety Management of the Pinglu Canal innovatively integrate the two sets of navigation rules for inland waterways and the sea, so that river and sea separated by a bridge are now "connected as one water."

　　A relevant responsible official from the Department of Transport of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region introduced that after the canal opened to navigation, Southwest China has two sea-going corridors—the Pinglu Canal and the Xijiang shipping trunk line—forming "one vertical and one horizontal"; for the middle and upper reaches, the vertical sea route reduces mileage by about 560 kilometers compared with the horizontal route, and is expected to save more than 5 billion yuan in transport costs annually. The river-rail-sea intermodal transport system centered on the Pinglu Canal is becoming a key fulcrum for reducing costs, improving quality, and increasing efficiency in the New Western Land-Sea Corridor.

　　On the day of opening, the "Nanning–Can Tho, Vietnam" foreign trade route and the "Nanning–Yangpu, Hainan" domestic trade route set sail in both directions, and four water passenger routes were also opened simultaneously. A single canal is linking "the vitality of the river" with "the power of the sea," propelling the inland hinterland of western China toward the forefront of opening up.