Building a Highway into Village is as Great as Sending Man into Space

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, January 01, 2003

Building a Highway into Village is as Great as Sending Man into Space

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Zhou Mingzhong has been for 36 years roaming all corners of Guizhou province in southwest China. As a section director of the provincial Communications Bureau, hisideal is to let every village in the province be linked with highways.

Although sending man into space now is among the hottest topics in the country, many people like Zhou are working hard on the ground to speed up the nation's wheel.

Things underfoot are important

The investment of China's space program is only a very small portion of that of the United States. However, the country has decided to pour a huge 800 billion yuan (nearly 100 billion US dollars) in constructing highways in its vast western region aloneby 2010.

To Zhou Mingzhong, building roads is as great and difficult as walking in the sky. The mountainous Guizhou is the only province without a single piece of plain, and it is the poorest province inChina.

Among Guizhou's 24,000 villages, 7,000 have not been reached byhighways. A similar picture can also be witnessed in many parts ofwest China.

Although the space industry will undoubtedly create a lot of opportunities for human beings, 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.

"So we must first well manage things underfoot. People would not enjoy other rights if they have no right to travel freely," Zhou says.

But constructing a road seems more difficult than sending man into space. In the 1950s, during the building of the Sichuan-Tibethighway, 3,000 soldiers died of landslides, low temperature and a lack of oxygen.

The government usually costs tens of millions of yuan enabling a highway to sprawl into a small village with only hundreds of households, according to Zhou.

"However, when the road finally opened, the villagers were so excited that they called it a 'second liberation'," Zhou says.

The first liberation took place in 1949 when the People's Republic was founded to enable the poor farmers to live a better life.

Artery of a nation

Roads are always of prior political importance in China, whose size of territory ranks third in the world.

In 221 BC, when emperor Qin Shihuang united China for the firsttime, one of his biggest programs was to build a road to link its capital Xianyang in Shanxi with the southern provinces, where riots were still frequent.

However, China had not built a single modern highway until 1913,and its combined length of highways was only 75,000 kilometers in 1949.

The country built its first expressway in 1984. In 1998, the central government decided to create a nationwide fever of highwayconstruction.

By 2001, the length of highways has reached 1.4 million kilometers, and it will be 1.7 million by 2010, among them 25,000 kilometers are expressways.

At the very beginning, more money was given to the eastern coastal regions, which are labor-intensive and are more attractiveto 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.

Thanks to the ballooning traffic networks, 1.3 billion people, 56 ethnic groups, and the country's economic strength as well as defense forces, are linked together, said Zhang Congyi, 58, a senior highway engineer.

Way to get reach

The most eye-catching one among many of the roads currently under construction is a 800 kilometers long expressway, which willlink Sichuan and Shanxi provinces in the western region.

"China's greatest poet Li Bai had told his unforgettable travelexperience 1,000 years ago: 'Walking from Shanxi 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 Shanxi and Sichuan, alongside plains are rare. It was actually a wooden and stone bridge zig-ragging 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 forliterary aspiration.

The road is fading into memory. "When the new road opens to traffic in 2005, driving from Shanxi to Sichuan will need only eight hours. But in ancient times, people had to spend several months stumbling through this distance," says Wu Dengchang, major of Baoji city of Shanxi.

Unlike the function of the Shudao and other ancient roads builtby emperors, which were mainly used to send army to suppress localriots, the modern roads are to provide commercial convenience for business people and farmers.

Wang Yulong, 58, a farmer, opened a restaurant near a new road stretching to his village 290 kilometers away from Xi'an, capital of Shanxi. He says he earns more money than planting grain as there are so many drivers eager to take a rest in his restaurant.

"I feel lucky after a new highway was built near my village," says Zhang Tian, 70, a Sichuan farmer. He says six of his seven children went into cities via the road and they have all found jobs.

Nowadays, along the new roads nationwide, travelers can usually find slogans pained on the walls of farmers' houses, like "Want toget rich? get onto an express way".

Road of emotion

However, to the artists, the disappearance of ancient plank roads has aroused some sentiment.

"They are live museums. Along them, we can still find numerous stone tablets, wooden architectures and valuable relics. People are worrying that the expressways will smash all this," says ZhangWeizhen, a painter working for a local artistic troupe in Shanxi.

Currently his only after-work favorite is to travel by foot along the plank road to draw the grandeur, trying to re-create Li Bai's poetic atmosphere on paper.

And Zhou Mingzhong is worrying that expressways would speed up the disappearance of old customs and traditions shared by ethnic tribes in high mountains.

Challenges also come from other fields, for instance, environmental problems caused by increasing number of vehicles. "They are testing our wisdom, we must build roads fully in accordance with Chinese conditions," says Zhou.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Communications, China will have had 1.7 million kilometers of highways by 2005, among them, 25,000 are expressways.

"After all, a country on wheels is the future," says the sentimental painter.

Source: Xinhua News Agency

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