International Land-Sea Trade Corridor boosts China-ASEAN business

Instead of about a month of transit for commodities from western regions to reach ASEAN member states via the Yangtze River and sea route, cargo consigned in Chongqing can now be delivered to Vietnam through the corridor in just four days, said Liang Yu, deputy head of the station.

The International Land-Sea Trade Corridor was launched in 2017, and is a trade and logistics passage jointly built by western Chinese provinces and ASEAN member states.

Chongqing is its transportation hub, and the corridor uses ports in Guangxi's Beibu Gulf to reach ports in Singapore and other ASEAN member states. It links China-Europe freight trains setting off from many western Chinese cities before heading to Central Asia, South Asia and Europe.

The corridor saw 379,000 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) containers transported by the railway's intermodal freight trains in the first six months this year, up by 33.4 per cent year on year, according to the China Railway Nanning Group Co. Ltd, official Chinese media reported.

The corridor, covering 14 provincial-level regions in China, has expanded its reach to 319 ports in 107 countries and regions.

Over the past five years, the trade volume between the regions and cities along the corridor in China with ASEAN has continued to rise, up from $58.9 billion in 2017 to $107.7 billion in 2021, official data showed.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS)