Qingdao has recently briefed the public on the general construction of the easiest access to the sea across the Yellow River Basin. Leveraging its comprehensive strength in transportation, namely building connections with other countries over land and sea while creating synergy between China’s eastern and western regions, Qingdao gives full play to its fundamental, strategic, pioneering and service-oriented transportation sector to accelerate the construction of an international integrated transport hub and an international gateway hub city and to build the easiest access to the sea across the Yellow River Basin, so as to help make solid progress in ecological protection and high-quality development along the Yellow River Basin.

To date, ports in Qingdao has so far operated 124 berths for production use, including 98 berths of 10,000-tonne-class or above, with an annual designed handling capacity of 387 million tonnes. Qingdao Port, which boasts a 400,000-tonne-class ore terminal, the world’s largest, a 450,000-tonne-class crude oil terminal, a bulk grain terminal with the largest handling capacity along the Yellow River Basin, Asia’s first fully automated terminal, a world-class cruise passenger transport center, is included among a handful of ports worldwide capable of handling a full range of goods, which can harbour the world’s largest container vessel with a capacity of 24,000 TEUs and the largest 225,000 tonnes cruise ship. Qingdao has opened up 31 domestic and overseas freight train lines on a regular basis, which help link up with 54 cities in 23 SCO member states or countries and regions involved in the Belt and Road Initiative. (Zhou Jianliang)

Cargoes are being loaded onto and unloaded from a vessel. By Zhang Jingang