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 | Wednesday, April 12, 2000, updated at 10:22(GMT+8) | ||||||||||||
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Ten Major Projects Slated for West ChinaChina will launch ten major construction projects this year in the country's western region to improve communications, the environment and flood control there, an official with the State Development Planning Commission said Tuesday.The projects include the construction of the 955-km-long Xi'an-Hefei section of the Xi'an-Nanjing railway, and the 640-km-long Chongqing-Huaihua railway, with an investment of 23.2 billion yuanand 18.2 billion yuan respectively. He said that China will also build several trunk highways in the western area and an airport in Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi Province, while building a light rail in Chongqing Municipality to improve urban transportation. A 953-km-long gas pipeline will be built to link the Qaidam Basin, a place rich in natural gas and crude oil, with Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province, through to Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province. The pipeline will have the capacity to move two billion cubic meters of natural gas annually. According the official, the two flood-control projects to be built in Sichuan Province and the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region will have multiple functions including electricity-generating and irrigation. The two projects are expected to cost about 7.5 billion yuan. As a major part of the country's west development strategy, 340,000 hectares of farm land along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River and Yellow River will be returned to forest, while over 430,000 hectares of waste land and hills will be reafforested. The ten projects also include the building of a potash fertilizer plant in Qinghai and improvements in the infrastructure for higher education in the west.
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