Chongqing's national and international roles

The Streaming Down the Yangtze team has arrived in Chongqing.

This is where the team will officially begin its 2-week trek down the Yangtze River.

Photo taken on April 22, 2017 shows the scenery of Chongqing, southwest China. [Photo: Xinhua]

The team will make stops in the cities of Yueyang, Wuhan, Jiujiang and Nanjing before reaching the final destination - Shanghai - where the Yangtze enters into the sea.

Chongqing is a key city on the Yangtze River, a transportation hub for western China, and also a key link along the Belt and Road.

For more on the trip, and what's happening in Chongqing, CRI's Paul James spoke earlier with with Yang Guang, CRI's reporter on the trip.

"We boarded the ship yesterday afternoon at a dock in downtown Chongqing and we now have arrived in Wanzhou District of Chongqing City, where we will have a look at a local river cleaning project. Our ship runs 30 kilometers per hour on average and is expected to reach Shanghai in 13 days after traveling over 1800 kilometers on water.

For the following journey every day we will leave the ship at daytime to visit the cities or counties we stop by and return to the ship at night to continue the trip.

Traveling on the river means we can see the Yangtze River from a very different perspective. On the ship we are able to observe the river closely and constantly see the banks of the river, comparing different places in terms of ecological situation, people's lifestyles and farming and industrial activities.

This is very different from traveling by land because on land we goes spot to spot but now t's more about consistency.

Yesterday we visited an inland port on the Yangtze River in Chongqing called Guoyuan Port. It's one of the biggest ports of the area, which can handle 30 million tons of cargoes annually. The advantage of the port is that it has the water depth similar to a sea port, which means those big freighters would be able to dock here to load and unload cargoes.

Besides Guoyuan Port's role as an inland port, it also functions along the Belt and Road route. Chongqing is already on the China-Europe rail line with at least one cargo train loaded with Chinese car, chemical and food products, departing here destined to cities like Belarus' Minsk and Germnay's Duisburg. Meantime southward railways and sea routes can mobilize products to Southeast Asian countries like Singapore and Malaysia.

In this sense, a railway has already been built across Guoyuan Port, which means cargoes from river can be immediately loaded on trains and transported to different railway junctions for further conveying. Guoyuan Port is a typical example of how rail lines are seamlessly connected with water ways.

In this way the goods from Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan Provinces, which don't have very mature logistics system, can depend on Yangtze River to be transported to the hub of Chongqing and further to domestic cities and to Belt and Road countries through railways.

The manager of Guoyuan Port told us the role Chongqing plays between Yangtze and Belt and Road has become increasingly significant and the city will benefit more from this trade openness."