As a section director of the Guizhou Provincial Communications
Bureau and someone who has spent 36 years roaming all corners of
the province, Zhou Mingzhong has a vision of linking every village
in the province with highways.
He, and many others like him, will continue to work hard on the
ground to ensure the dream is realized even as the current hot
topic is China's plan to send man into space.
The country's investment in its space program is only a very small
portion of what the US spends on its own. In contrast, the country
has decided to pour a massive 800 billion yuan (US$96 billion) in
constructing highways in its vast western region alone by 2010.
To
Zhou, building roads is as great and difficult as walking in the
sky. Mountainous Guizhou is the only province without a single
piece of plain, and it is the poorest province in China.
Among Guizhou's 24,000 villages, 7,000 have not been reached by
highways and the picture is similar in many parts of west China.
Although the space industry will undoubtedly create a lot of
opportunities, it is still beyond the reach of China's poor
villagers, whose simplest dream is that one day a vehicle would
carry a TV set to their home.
But constructing a road seems more difficult than sending man into
space. In the 1950s, during the building of the Sichuan-Tibet
highway, 3,000 soldiers died from landslides, low temperature and a
lack of oxygen. The government usually invests tens of millions of
yuan to build a highway to connect a small village with only
hundreds of households, according to Zhou.
The country built its first expressway in 1984. In 1998, the
central government decided to embark on a nationwide highway
construction. By 2001, the length of highways has reached 1.4
million kilometers, and will extend to 1.7 million by 2010, of
which 25,000 kilometers will be expressways, according to the
Ministry of Communications.
In
the beginning, funds for highway construction were allocated to the
eastern coastal regions with its huge populations that were more
attractive to foreign investment. Over the past several years, the
focus has been gradually shifting to the mountainous, poverty-hit
and population-sparse western region, which covers some two-thirds
of the country's territory.
The most eye-catching one among many of the roads currently under
construction is an 800-kilometer-long expressway, which will link
Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces in the western region.
"China's greatest poet Li Bai had told his unforgettable travel
experience 1,000 years ago: 'Walking from Shaanxi to Sichuan is
harder than climbing up to the sky'," says Zhang Congyi, who is
participating in the project.
Built 2,300 years ago, "Shudao" or road to Shu (the abbreviation of
Sichuan) was a plank road and the only linkage between Shaanxi and
Sichuan, alongside plains are rare. It was actually a wooden and
stone bridge zigzagging on rising cliffs. Documents say in some
sections it only allows two persons to pass by.
Despite its danger and steepness, the extremely narrow, snaky, and
usually fog-covering ancient road provided a vivid picture for
literary aspiration.
(Xinhua News Agency January 11, 2003)