CCTV News: According to the WeChat official account of the Ministry of Transport, recently, with the approval of the State Council, the Ministry of Transport and the National Development and Reform Commission issued the "Action Plan for Promoting the Implementation of the Inland Water Transport System Connection Project" (hereinafter referred to as the "Action Plan") to implement it at the provincial people's governments. The "Action Plan" aims to implement the decisions and deployments of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, further clear out the bottlenecks and checkpoints of inland shipping, serve to reduce costs, improve quality and efficiency of transportation and logistics, and promote the high-quality development of inland shipping in the new era.
The Action Plan is guided by the Outline of Building a Strong Transportation Country, the National Comprehensive Three-dimensional Transportation Network Planning Outline and the National Port and Waterway Layout Planning Plan. It focuses on the "hard connectivity" of infrastructure, promotes "soft improvement" of transportation services, and grasps "strong guarantee" of capital factors. It strives to build a modern inland water transport connectivity system that runs across the east and west, radiates north and south, and is smooth inside and outside by 2030, providing strong support for accelerating the construction of a strong transportation country.
The Action Plan takes "opening up the bottlenecks and checkpoints in inland waterways" as the direction, and proposes key tasks such as optimizing the main channel, comprehensively unblocking high-level waterway network, consolidating and improving the energy level of port hubs, and improving the level of transportation organization and intelligence, so as to better give full play to the comparative advantages of large-scale and low-cost inland waterways, and better serve to reduce the logistics costs of the whole society.
The Action Plan clearly states that all relevant departments should strengthen coordination, clarify division of responsibilities, refine goals and tasks, and ensure funds and factors for inland water transport projects to ensure that all work is implemented in place. Local governments at all levels must implement their main responsibilities and effectively clear out the bottlenecks and checkpoints of inland shipping.
