‘Time is ripe’: why China is eyeing another vast canal link to Southeast Asia

China has almost finished building the US$10 billion Pinglu Canal to deepen trade ties between its southwestern provinces and Southeast Asia. Now, it is considering an even more ambitious – and expensive – project further inland.The Xianggui Canal would be a 300km (186 mile) waterway that effectively acts as an extension of the new Pinglu Canal, giving cities right at the heart of the Chinese interior direct access to the Gulf of Tonkin, known in China as the Beibu Gulf.Like the earlier project, the aim is to give China’s inland cities quicker and easier access to global shipping lanes, easing shipments to the country’s biggest export market: the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean).If completed, the Xianggui Canal would enable China to create a vast network of waterways – known as the “Han-Xiang-Gui corridor” – stretching 3,200km from north to south across four provinces: namely, Shaanxi, Hubei, Hunan and Guangxi.The fate of the project remains uncertain, as constructing the Xianggui Canal would be staggeringly expensive. At an estimated 150 billion yuan (US$21.6 billion), it would be more than twice as expensive as the Pinglu Canal.But the imminent opening of the new waterway in Guangxi has increased its chances of moving forward, as the “time is ripe” for such a project, said Lu Yi, a professor at the School of Transportation at Changsha University of Science and Technology.