Nanjing, May 29 (IANS) In this former imperial capital, modern China is showcasing its amazing infrastructural advancement with a showpiece airport, one of the 40 odd airports that will be built or upgraded in the next five years.
China is going to spend more on airport development in these five years than it did in the last 15. The state-owned China Daily quoted Zhao Hongyuan, a senior official of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), the industry regulator, as saying that the number of airports in the country would rise to 190 from the present 142, with the number expected to reach 220 by 2020.
The greenfield airport in this historic southern city, capital of Jiangsu province, one of China's most economically vibrant and attracting a big chunk of its $46 billion annual foreign investment, is such a shining showpiece that foreign visitors are brought to it to see what has been achieved.
It hardly gets any international flights, other than from Taiwan that anyway China considers to be part of it, and yet it has managed an investment of $300 million in building the airport, shifting the 2,500-odd staff from the old airport to the new and ensuring that no one lost jobs.
'Civil aviation is a very important propeller of the state and national economy,' says a senior airport official of Nanjing airport as he shows around visitors.
But government plays role of macro-regulator and ensures that modernization has no negative impact on job security and welfare, he adds.
China opened the aviation sector to foreign and domestic investment in 2002 and among the bidders is Fraport - the Frankfurt airport company that is part of a consortium that won the bid to modernize Delhi airport. It has bought a 25 percent stake in Ningbo airport in east China and is in talks for an ever bigger stake in Xianyang airport in northwest China.
With soaring air traffic, domestic airlines carried 138 million passengers last year, up 15.5 percent from the previous year, matched by 13.8 percent growth in cargo traffic as well. The CAAC says it expects air traffic to grow by 14 percent annually till at least 2010, necessitating the construction of so many new airports.
Published figures here say that the US, with 270 million people, has 14,807 airports, implying that China, with 142 airports to serve 1.3 billion people, had a lot of catching up to do.
China's obsession with catching up with the world is similarly driving its expressway building frenzy. In 1988, China did not have an inch of expressway. At the end of 2005, the country had 41,000 km of expressways, the world's second largest after the US, the official website Chinaview said while giving the latest figures.
About 24,000 km were added between 2001 and 2005 at the rate of about 4,800 km per year. By 2010, the total length of expressway is expected to be around 65,000 km, still short of the US that has 90,000 km of expressway.
Chinese road planners plan to add 24,000 km in the next five years to take China to the number two position, ahead of Canada and Germany which, according to Chinese figures, rank third and fourth in the world's expressway length. The plan is to connect all provincial capitals and cities with at least half a million population and some with a population of even 200,000 to 500,000.
And by 2020, the plan is to have at least 90,000 km of expressways with a total spending of two trillion yuan (about $245 billion), to be raised from overseas and private investors.
'Building roads is an ideal to help the economy grow,' said Dai Dongchang, director of the Transport Planning and Research Institute. At least 60 percent of the Chinese economy is facilitated by road transportation.
© 2006 Indo-Asian News Service | 
