Provinces in western China have accelerated the construction of highways to meet the needs of the expected forthcoming economic upsurge in the region. Work on a four-lane highway bridge began recently at the Three Gorges reservoir area in Chongqing, the largest metropolis in southwest China.

The 956-meter-long bridge will serve as a corridor leading to Hunan, Hubei, and Shaanxi provinces when it opens.

Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, has just finished building an electric railway line between Chengdu and Kunming and a double-track railway between Baoji and Chengdu.

Also, an expressway linking Chengdu with Ya'an will soon open to traffic. The 140-km-long expressway, a key thoroughfare betweenSichuan and Yunnan provinces and the Tibet Autonomous Region, was built at a cost of 3.7 billion yuan.

By the end of last year, there were more than 800 km of expressway in Sichuan, and an expressway network with Chengdu at the center has now been established, said one local highway administration official.

Northwest China's Qinghai Province increased its highway mileage to 17,936 km at a cost of 1.37 billion yuan in the first 11 months of last year. The investment was 30 percent more than that in the corresponding period the previous year.

Gansu Province invested 4.18 billion yuan to build 18 key highway projects last year, doubling the 1998 figure. It also plans to allocate 38.2 billion yuan over the next six years to build inter-provincial highways and form an expressway network centered around Lanzhou, the provincial capital.