Last week, China rolled out a once-in-a-decade overarching plan for the national road network. The new roadmap charted another 60,000 km by 2035 on top of the 400,000 km outlined in the previous 2013 edition. It explains how China annually spends 2.4% of its GDP on road construction. To put it in perspective, China’s yearly defense budget, often portrayed as gargantuan to feed the “China threat” hysteria, only accounts for 1.4% of the GDP.

(Note: The portion allocated for state-level roads, the ones outlined in the plan in question, accounts for around 36% of the total road-building finance. The other four levels of roads in China are pertaining to provinces, counties, townships and villages, which take up the rest of the funds and each build and maintain roads in their respective purview.)

China’s road-building drive has recently kept relatively low-profile vis-a-vis the high-speed rail, which has risen to a living metaphor of China’s capacity to expand infrastructure. However, roads are the blood veins that generally sustain the world’s second largest economy. Up to now, three-quarters of the country’s freight transit relies on road trasnportation. And the number of automobiles in China by this March hit 300 million, which nearly doubled in the past eight years. Chinese have been chanting the famous phrase “If you want to get rich, build a road first” since the country began to embrace market economy in the late 1970s, and the infrastructure boom therefore becomes integral to China's success story. Over forty years later, however, nationwide road connections are still far from enough.

This new plan for the national road network, 5th of its kind in history, details every single state-level road that will break ground by 2035. Maintaining the so-called “7-11-18” and “12-47-60” layout for expressways and highways established in 2013, (The three figures refer to the number of radial, north-south, east-west arterial roads) this edition shuns major changes to the nationwide arterial structure, a move that featured the past four such documents. It shows China’s national road building has broken away from the massive expansion approach and entered a stage of elaborate planning. And some new arrangements in the blueprint offer interesting insights into the country’s focus in the near future. This article will help you connect the dots.

(Note: China’s state-level roads have been categorized into expressways高速公路 and highways国道 since 2004. Expressways are tolled, closed-off roads aimed at efficient and fast passage. Highways provide basic, free-of-charge traffic service.)

Cross-Region Balance

Road construction in western and frontier regions ranks high on the agenda. Among the few recent mainstay projects specified in the plan, three are related to these less accessible parts of China: border highways, Sichuan-Tibet connections, overall upgrade of road networks in west China. These efforts reflect China’s long-established national strategy of “coordinated regional development.”

The plan says “the top priority of recent highway construction is to finish all sections of border highways such as G219 and G331.” These two highways stretch along China’s entire land border through some of the most treacherous terrains on earth. The 10,000-km G219, arguably the longest state-level road, runs through most of the frontier areas from the coast of the South China Sea all the way to Xinjiang’s northernmost Altay Mountains. The rudiment of this meandering route was the trailblazing Xinjiang-Tibet road built by PLA soldiers 4,000 meters high on the plateau in 1957, connecting southern Xinjiang’s Kashgar with Tibet’s least reachable Ngari Prefecture. It goes without saying that G219 and G331, yet to be open for passage in all sections, have tremendous strategic implications for both national defense and local governance. And thanks to China’s explosive growth of privately owned vehicles, these two roads also become Internet sensations for an ever-expanding community of self-driving tourists hunting exotic natural landscapes. A booming tourist industry stimulated by these “gateways to the west” will undoubtedly help facilitate east-west interactions and bridge regional gaps.