This decade, look at China's infrastructure

Infrastructure is an important support for economic and social development and plays a strategic, basic and pioneering role. The decade since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China has been a decade in which China has rapidly advanced into a powerful country in infrastructure construction. In the past decade, China has not only accelerated the construction of traditional infrastructure such as transportation, but also made new breakthroughs in the construction of new infrastructure. The achievements reflected in the various statistics are dizzying.

Transportation: people enjoy its travel, things smooth its flow

Under the principle of moderately advanced construction, China has made remarkable achievements in the construction of transportation infrastructure, building the world's largest high-speed railway network, expressway network, and world-class port cluster. Beijing Daxing Airport, Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, Shanghai Yangshan Port Automation terminal and other landmark projects have witnessed China's progress toward becoming a transportation power.

Open roads in mountains and build Bridges in rivers. In the past ten years, China has increased the length of its railways and highways by 1.1 million kilometers, equivalent to traveling around the equator 27 and a half times. Investment in railway fixed assets exceeded 7 trillion yuan, increasing the mileage by 52,000 kilometers. By the end of 2021, the highway network density will reach 55 kilometers per 100 square kilometers, an increase of 24.6 percent over 2012; 82 transport airports were built or relocated, bringing the total number of airports to 250, with a total designed capacity of more than 1.4 billion passengers. The comprehensive transportation system with huge scale, smooth internal communication and external communication has attracted the world's attention.

When it comes to the "Chinese business card" in the field of transportation, we cannot but mention China's high-speed rail. In 2012, the length of high-speed rail in operation was 9,356 kilometers, but now the number exceeds 40,000 kilometers. Now, passengers can travel from the capital Beijing to 54 cities within half a day by high-speed rail, and "seeing China by high-speed rail" has become a true portrayal of people enjoying a better life.

The development of transportation facilities not only shortens the distance between time and space, but also speeds up the flow of materials and people. From the data in 2021, China has an average of about 69,000 ships entering and leaving ports, 26,800 aircraft taking off and landing, and nearly 300 million pieces of express mail processing every day. During peak hours, more than 10,000 passenger trains run on railways and more than 60 million vehicles run on expressways every day. A large number of major strategic projects have supported a mobile China.

In winning the battle against poverty and serving rural revitalization, transport construction has also played an important role. Data show that the total length of rural roads increased from 3.564 million kilometers at the end of 2011 to 4.466 million kilometers at the end of 2021, a net increase of more than 900,000 kilometers in 10 years. The difficulty of connecting 1,040 townships and 105,000 established villages with hardened roads has been solved, and farmers' "carrying their feet on the bus" has become a reality from a wish. Driven by rural roads, mountain goods go to the city and city goods go to the countryside, and the interaction between urban and rural people, logistics, and capital flow accelerates, driving rural income and farmers to get rich.

China's infrastructure is also going abroad. The China-Laos Railway, the Azerbaijan-Djibouti Railway and the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway were put into operation, the Jakarta-Bandar high-speed Railway was carried out in an orderly manner, and the second phase of equity delivery of the Piraeus Port was completed smoothly, all of which became important achievements of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Energy and power: the guarantee capacity continues to improve

Over the past decade, China has built a number of world-class energy infrastructure projects.

At the lower reaches of the Jinsha River on the border of Sichuan and Yunnan, Baihetan Hydropower Station, with a total installed capacity of 16 million kilowatts, is the largest hydropower project under construction in the world and the most technically difficult. When fully completed and put into operation, the annual average power generation will reach 62.443 billion KWH.

In Xinghua Bay, Fuqing, Fujian Province, 59 100-meter-high white wind turbines stand in the sea. As the world's first high-power offshore wind power prototype test wind farm, Fuqing Xinghua Bay offshore wind Farm has an annual generating capacity of 1.4 billion KWH, which can meet the normal electricity demand of 20,000 families of three.

In January 2021, or in Xinghua Bay, the world's first "Hualong One" nuclear power unit, Fujian Fuqing Nuclear Power Unit 5, was put into commercial operation, marking that China ranks among the forefront of the world in the field of three-generation nuclear power technology.

To ensure energy security, China has accelerated the implementation of a new strategy for energy security, focused on building a clean, low-carbon, safe and efficient energy system, and significantly improved its ability to ensure energy supply.

By the end of 2021, China's total installed power generation capacity will reach 2.38 billion kW, double that of 2012, with an average annual growth rate of 8.4%. China's power transmission lines with 220 kV or above reached 843,000 kilometers, and the capacity of substation equipment reached 4.94 billion kVA, 1.7 times and 2.2 times that of 2012, respectively. The length of oil and gas pipelines in China reached 180,000 kilometers, double that of 2012. The construction of trans-provincial and trans-regional energy transmission channels has been strengthened.

On the premise of ensuring a secure and reliable supply of energy, China continues to promote the clean and low-carbon transformation of its energy structure. At present, the installed capacity of renewable energy power generation in China has exceeded 1 billion kilowatts, and the total installed capacity of green electricity ranks first in the world. By the end of 2021, the total installed capacity of wind power PV connected to the grid was 635 million kilowatts, nearly 90 times that of 2012.

Livelihood Project: Changing everyone's life

Ten years ago, in some places such as Handan and Xingtai, Hebei Province, the problem of excessive fluorine in rural drinking water was still very serious, and brackish water and high-fluorine water were the heart of many people. By the end of 2014, the first phase of the Middle route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project was fully operational. From the Danjiangkou Reservoir, located in the middle and upper reaches of the Han River, the clear water flows thousands of kilometers north, bringing rain to a region that is desperately short of water.

As one of the largest water diversion projects in the world, the South-to-North Water Diversion Project has made use of open channels, aqueducts, tunnels and other technologies in its construction, creating the world's largest water transport aqueduct and the world's largest modern pumping station group. Since its opening, Nanshui has become the main water source for more than 140 million people in more than 280 counties (cities and districts) in more than 40 large and medium-sized cities in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Henan and other places.

According to statistics, as of May 13 this year, the total amount of water transferred by the eastern and middle routes of the South-to-North Water diversion project had reached 53.1 billion cubic meters, 8.5 billion cubic meters of ecological water replenishment had been implemented for more than 50 rivers along the route, and more than 5 billion cubic meters of groundwater had been reduced in the water receiving areas. Now, families in the receiving areas of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project can drink water from the Yangtze River thousands of miles away as soon as they turn on the tap.

Other livelihood infrastructure projects, although not as large as the South-to-North Water Diversion project, have also improved people's lives.

Since 2018, the Party Central Committee has deployed actions to improve the rural living environment, promote the rural "toilet revolution", and improve rural living facilities. By the end of 2021, the penetration rate of sanitary toilets in rural areas of the country has exceeded 70%, of which the penetration rate of sanitary toilets in rural areas with basic conditions such as eastern regions, urban suburbs in central and western regions has exceeded 90%. In addition, at present, the proportion of natural villages in the country that collect and transport rural domestic waste has remained stable at more than 90%.

Digital communication: Seize the commanding heights of future development

With the network power, broadband China, "Internet +" action, this decade, China's information and communication industry to achieve iterative leapfrog, built the world's largest, leading technology network infrastructure. Among them, the optical fiber network access bandwidth has achieved exponential growth from 10 megabits to 100 megabits and then to gigabit, and the mobile network has achieved a leap from "3G breakthrough" to "4G synchronization" to "5G leadership".

In 2012, the number of mobile phone base stations in the country just exceeded 2 million, and by the end of 2021, the number reached 9.96 million. At present, China has historically achieved "broadband access to every village" in the country's administrative villages, the average download rate of broadband networks has increased by nearly 40 times, the scale of 4G base stations accounts for more than half of the world's total, and the construction of 5G base stations has reached 1.615 million.

The information infrastructure throughout the country has provided strong support for the construction of digital society and digital government. In the past, people had to go to one or more departments to do business, and sometimes they had to go back and forth several times. Now, many places have implemented digital government services, which not only saves the time and energy of the people, but also realizes the process transparency of public services and data sharing.

Led by new telecommunication technologies, Internet applications such as e-commerce, e-government and telecommuting have gained widespread popularity. The annual transaction volume of mobile payment has reached 527 trillion yuan. Developed information infrastructure networks have completely changed people's living habits.

The application of the Internet in the field of production is also accelerating the expansion and deepening. Up to now, China's industrial Internet high-quality external network covers more than 300 cities across the country, cultivating more than 150 large-scale industrial Internet platforms, connecting industrial equipment more than 78 million units (sets), and industrial Internet applications have covered 45 national economic categories. Such "digital infrastructure" is not only the cornerstone of the development of the digital economy, but also an important engine for optimizing the economic structure and promoting long-term sustainable economic development.

As the core productivity of digital economy development, computing power has become an important infrastructure for national economic development. Since the beginning of this year, 25 of the 10 national data center clusters in the country have started new projects, driving investment in all aspects of more than 190 billion yuan.

In February this year, the "East number and West calculation" project was officially launched, through the data of the eastern developed regions, transmission to the western region rich in computing power resources for calculation and storage, both to alleviate the problem of energy tension in the east, but also to open up a new road for development in the west.

At present, from the central to the local, including 5G base stations, industrial Internet, data centers and other new infrastructure projects are still in solid progress. In the future, China will comprehensively strengthen the construction of information infrastructure, expand the depth of 5G network coverage, and accelerate the large-scale application of 5G and other emerging technologies to help high-quality economic development and sustained improvement of people's livelihood.