New freight route from Fujian's Pingtan links Taiwan

Over 700 tons of goods from Taiwan’s Kaosiung arrived at Pingtan port of Fujian Province along with a sea freighter named Taipei Express in morning on January 20. Successful opening of this direct freight route, between Pingtan and Kaohsiung, brings the county with a new and easy access to Taiwan.

The 178-nautical mile journey between Pingtan and Kaohsiung takes about 9 hours, according to a head from Pingtan’s comprehensive pilot zone. The route utilizes existing freighters of Taipei Express and ships southern Taiwan’s fruits, vegetables and sea food products to mainland from Kaohsiung port to Pingtan port during weekends.

Pingtan’s comprehensive pilot zone has opened two direct routes for passenger ships “Haixia Hao” and “Natchan Rera”, namely, the Pingtan-Taichung and Pingtan-Taipei routes, as well as direct routes for ten-thousand-ton fast freighters to Taiwan’s Taipei port and Kaohsiung port.

Besides the new route for Taiwan, Pingtan’s cross-Straits comprehensive transportation hub has won various supports in recent years.

Ever since Fujian provincial government issued the Measure Supporting Pingtan’s New Round of Opening and Development towards Taiwan in November 2018, the provincial department of transportation, office of leading group for digital Fujian construction and department of commerce as well as other departments have issued specific policies and measures to support the opening and development in Pingtan.

Fujian’s provincial department of transportation proposed to accelerate the construction of comprehensive transportation system, actively promote the construction of infrastructures in Pingtan including railway, road and water transportation, enhance to build “four transportation approaches and two systems”, continuously improve Pingtan’s extensive transportation capability and support the county as a comprehensive transportation hub across the Straits, so as to better serve and advance its construction as “one island, two windows and three districts”.

On December 28, 2018, the first linked bridge, the Pingtan Straits dual purpose bridge for road and railway along Fuzhou-Pingtan railway, namely, the steel truss for water route bridge between Dalian Island and Xiaolian Island saw successful closure. According to Peng Guanghui, chairman of Fujian’s Fuping Railway Co., Ltd, the Fuzhou-Pingtan railway is expected to be officially opened in October 2020.

Economists said that the composition of political and transportation advantages will be turned into benefits in development which promote Pingtan to be a comprehensive transportation hub across the Straits.

Pingtan will, in turn, bring in large-scale logistics companies and make itself a port of major logistics and distribution across the Straits. The Cainiao network, a member of Alibaba Group and logistics solutions operator specializing in support of Tmall customer services, has set its office in Pingtan and successfully connected with local cross-border e-commerce platforms.

According to official statistics, in 2018 Pingtan sees a total of 1,234 new enterprises featuring logistics trading and headquarters economy. The value of cross-border e-commerce and maritime shipping goods trading exceeded 1 billion RMB for the first time, and the total shipping capacity of maritime industry exceeded 3 million tons.

Chen Shanguang, secretary of the party working committee of Pingtan’s comprehensive pilot zone said recently that the zone will take the lead in exploring a “Pingtan model” in terms of economic and trade cooperation, infrastructure connectivity, energy and resource connectivity as well as industry standard sharing across the Straits, aiming to boost the gathering of people, logistics, capital flow and information flow in Pingtan.