Good transportation opens the way to an improved economy.
One of China's strategic goals is to rely more and more on internal demand for the products it manufactures, rather than on export markets.
That is only possible if regions are well connected, and is part of the reason the Chinese government is spending billions of dollars on highways, high-speed rail, tunnels, bridges and more.
Several years back I remember reading a statistic that for some products (I think it was flat screen TVs) that are produced in the south west of China, it was costlier in both time and money to transport the finished goods from the factory to Shanghai (a major port city) than it was to then ship them from Shanghai to the US.
The other half of that is after you truck it to a store in Shanghai, it's more expensive for the end user to buy (tax on electronics), despite incomes being like 1/5th.
One of China's strategic goals is to rely more and more on internal demand for the products it manufactures, rather than on export markets.
That is only possible if regions are well connected, and is part of the reason the Chinese government is spending billions of dollars on highways, high-speed rail, tunnels, bridges and more.
Several years back I remember reading a statistic that for some products (I think it was flat screen TVs) that are produced in the south west of China, it was costlier in both time and money to transport the finished goods from the factory to Shanghai (a major port city) than it was to then ship them from Shanghai to the US.