Instead of bitching and crying about China, we’d be better off to be more like them and invest at home instead of spending billions in weapons to the israeli terror regime so they can kill more children.
Yup, this is a big deal: the Pinglu Canal is China's first river-to-sea canal since the founding of the People's Republic.
It cost US$10.2 billion to build and is designed for 5000-ton ships of 90 meter length.
It's part of a bigger master plan that China calls the "New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor" (ILSTC, 西部陆海新通道) to solve a structural geographic problem: the country's vast western interior (places like Chongqing, Sichuan Guangxi, Guizhou, Gansu, Qinghai) has historically been cut off from global shipping lanes, with goods having to travel east - often thousands of kilometers - to reach the coast at ports like Guangzhou or Shanghai before heading out to sea.
Which is super inconvenient for, for instance, China's trade with ASEAN - its biggest trading partner today.
Up until recently, if you wanted to ship something from, say, Chongqing to Vietnam, you had to go east all the way down to Guangzhou before you could head back south. A massive detour.
In effect the entire logic of the plan, including the Pinglu Canal, is to reorient the economic geography of China's less developed western provinces away from dependence on the wealthy eastern seaboard and toward direct engagement with Southeast Asia.
It's as much about internal rebalancing - developing the west - as it is about external trade connectivity.