On September 16, 2026, a 5,000-ton cargo vessel sounded its horn and set sail in Guangxi, southern China, marking the official opening of a new man-made waterway: the Pinglu Canal.
For most Western readers, Guangxi may be an unfamiliar name. A provincial-level region in southern China bordering Vietnam, it has roughly 1,600 kilometers of coastline. Yet the mountains that crisscross the region have long separated its inland waterways from the sea. Although Nanning, the regional capital, is only a little over 100 kilometers from the coast, cargo has traditionally had to travel more than 800 kilometers eastward to reach the sea through ports in neighboring Guangdong.
The Pinglu Canal was built to overcome precisely this geographic constraint.
Starting at the Pingtang River estuary in Hengzhou, near Nanning, the canal runs south across the watershed before following the Qin River into the Beibu Gulf, an inlet of the northwestern South China Sea bordering Vietnam. Stretching 134.2 kilometers, it is roughly equivalent to the distance from New York to Philadelphia.
The project cost approximately 72.7 billion yuan (about US$10 billion) and took four years to complete. Construction involved the excavation of some 315 million cubic meters of earth and rock—enough to fill roughly 95 Hoover Dams. Built to China’s highest classification standards for inland waterways, the canal can accommodate vessels of up to 5,000 tons. A single vessel of this size can carry roughly as much cargo as 200 heavy-duty trucks.
The canal has a designed annual one-way capacity of 89 million tons, second only to the Yangtze and Pearl River systems among China’s inland waterways.
Upstream, the canal connects with the Xijiang River, the most important inland waterway in southern China and the main trunk of the Pearl River system. This network provides access to inland provinces and municipalities including Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, and Chongqing, whose combined population exceeds 200 million and which have long faced the disadvantage of being far from major seaports.
With the canal now open, cargo from southwestern China can reach the sea via the Pinglu Canal while shortening the inland waterway journey by more than 560 kilometers—roughly the distance from London to Edinburgh. Overall logistics costs are expected to fall by 18 to 30 percent.
On the canal’s opening day, two new routes also made their maiden voyages: the Nanning Port–Can Tho Port direct river-sea international trade route between China and Vietnam, and the Nanning Port–Yangpu Port domestic trade route linking Guangxi with Hainan. The launch means cargo can now travel directly from inland ports to Southeast Asia without transshipment.
A Century in the Making
The completion of the Pinglu Canal was not the product of a short-term decision or a spur-of-the-moment infrastructure push. It was the result of a century of planning and a long process of surveys, feasibility studies, and national-level development planning.
The idea can be traced back to 1919. In The International Development of China, Sun Yat-sen, a pioneer of China’s democratic revolution, proposed connecting the Xijiang River with the Beibu Gulf and developing Qinzhou Port into a major port in southern China. He predicted that areas west of Qinzhou would be able to use the port to reach the sea, reducing the distance by 400 miles compared with routes through Guangzhou.
It took an entire century to turn that vision into reality.
Ninety-two-year-old Ding Jianguo is one of the people who witnessed this long journey firsthand. A former technician with the shipping division of the Guangxi Department of Transportation, Ding worked in Guangxi’s inland waterway system for nearly four decades, traveling extensively along navigable rivers throughout the region.
In 1968, at the age of 34, Ding was assigned by Weng Changpu, the Guangxi government’s chief technical adviser, to conduct the first field survey of the future canal. Together with six other technicians, he ventured deep into the remote mountains of the watershed, carrying surveying instruments—including a plane table and theodolite—as well as an old 1:50,000-scale map dating back to the Republican era.
It was the first field survey ever conducted for the Pinglu Canal.
The team took measurements at 50-meter intervals and advanced roughly five kilometers a day on foot. After more than two months in the field, they completed the Survey and Planning Report for the Pinglu Canal.
Its conclusion was straightforward: the project was technically feasible, but the time was not yet right to proceed. China’s economic output and freight demand at the time were simply not sufficient to support such a massive undertaking.
Ding later recalled, “Once we knew that the Xijiang River in Guangxi could be connected to the sea, we felt our wish had been fulfilled.”
The idea did not disappear. In the 1990s, Guangxi’s transportation authorities organized more detailed surveys and geological drilling, but the project was once again shelved because of economic constraints.
The turning point came around the turn of the century.
In 1999, the Fourth Plenary Session of the 15th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China—a high-level decision-making meeting at which major national strategies were formulated—formally proposed the implementation of the Western Development Strategy. The initiative called for large-scale, centrally supported investment in infrastructure and economic development across China’s inland western regions.
In 2000, the State Council held a conference on the development of the western region and identified transportation infrastructure as a priority.
From there, China’s Five-Year Plans—the country’s medium-term national economic and social development plans, which are a central framework for allocating public resources and guiding industrial development—gradually incorporated southwestern access to the sea into the country’s broader strategic planning.
In 2019, the National Development and Reform Commission issued the Master Plan for the New Western Land-Sea Corridor. The corridor is a strategic logistics route linking the Silk Road Economic Belt in the north with the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road in the south while connecting with the Yangtze River Economic Belt. Its purpose is to establish a more direct route from western China to the sea.
The Pinglu Canal was identified in the plan as a key project for further study.
In January 2022, the State Council’s 14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of a Modern Comprehensive Transportation System further called for research into and construction of the Pinglu Canal. Construction officially began in August that year.
Now, as China enters its 15th Five-Year Plan period, the Ministry of Transport has said it will continue accelerating the development of the New Western Land-Sea Corridor and work to raise the completion rate of the backbone of the national comprehensive three-dimensional transportation network to 95 percent. The network is designed to integrate railways, highways, waterways, and civil aviation into a nationwide transportation system.
From an idea on paper a century ago, through more than half a century of surveys and feasibility studies, to its incorporation into national planning and eventual completion, the history of the Pinglu Canal reflects a distinctive feature of China’s infrastructure development: planning first, followed by sustained commitment over the long term.
A New Gateway Between Southwest China and ASEAN
As a backbone project of the New Western Land-Sea Corridor, the significance of the Pinglu Canal extends far beyond improving transportation within a single province. It is directly reshaping the logistics landscape between southwestern China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
ASEAN is a regional organization comprising ten Southeast Asian countries and is China’s largest trading partner.
For decades, the lack of a direct river-to-sea connection meant that cargo from southwestern China bound for Southeast Asia had to travel eastward along the Xijiang River before reaching ports in Guangdong. This not only increased transport distances but also prevented the Beibu Gulf ports from fully capitalizing on their natural deep-water advantages.
The Pinglu Canal establishes a direct north-south link between the Xijiang River and the Beibu Gulf. It cuts more than 560 kilometers from the inland shipping route between southwestern China and ASEAN, is expected to reduce overall logistics costs by 18 to 30 percent, and could save more than 5 billion yuan in transportation costs each year.
The resulting efficiency gains are expected to translate into tangible increases in trade.
Jimmy, the Philippine ambassador to China, has pointed out that time-sensitive Philippine exports to China, including fresh fruit and seafood, could benefit from shorter transit times through the Pinglu Canal. Chakkra, Thailand’s deputy commerce minister, has said logistics costs for Thai products shipped to China are expected to fall significantly, allowing more Thai goods to reach consumers in southwestern China more quickly.
Vietnamese Ambassador to China Pham Thanh Binh, after visiting the project, said that the advanced technologies and management practices employed by the Pinglu Canal could provide useful reference points for ASEAN countries, including Vietnam.
At the industrial-chain level, the Pinglu Canal complements the rail and highway networks of the New Western Land-Sea Corridor, creating a multimodal transportation system integrating rail, road, inland waterways, and maritime shipping.
To the north, the network can connect with the China-Europe Railway Express—the network of regularly operated container freight trains linking China and Europe. To the south, it provides direct access to major ASEAN ports, allowing Southeast Asian economies to become more deeply integrated into global industrial and supply chains.
Rao Zhaobin, director of the Institute of China Studies at the University of Malaya, believes the canal will strengthen Qinzhou Port’s position as a regional shipping hub and benefit cross-border industrial cooperation platforms such as the China-Malaysia Qinzhou Industrial Park.
Liu Wentian, president of the Singapore China South Chamber of Commerce, has noted that the additional cargo generated in southwestern China by the canal can connect with Singapore’s global shipping network, improving overall regional logistics efficiency.
Within the framework of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)—the world’s largest free-trade agreement by population and economic scale, covering China, ASEAN, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand—the infrastructure connectivity represented by the Pinglu Canal is providing a stronger physical foundation for regional economic integration.
Connectivity with ASEAN is therefore becoming a natural extension of China’s infrastructure planning in the new era.
Connectivity as a Development Model
The development logic embodied by the Pinglu Canal is not an isolated case.
In recent years, China has continued to promote an international cooperation model centered on infrastructure connectivity and shared development across a much broader geographic area.
In December 2024, a launch ceremony for the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Railway project was held in Jalal-Abad, Kyrgyzstan. In April 2025, construction officially began on the project’s key control works.
The railway will run from Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang region through Kyrgyzstan to Andijan in Uzbekistan. It is a flagship Belt and Road Initiative project promoted by the leaders of China, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.
The Belt and Road Initiative, proposed by China in 2013, is an international cooperation initiative aimed at promoting shared development through infrastructure construction, trade, and investment cooperation.
Once completed, the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Railway is expected to become a major transportation artery linking Central Asia and extending into the broader Eurasian continent.
Together with projects such as the China-Europe Railway Express and the China-Laos Railway—which connects Kunming in China with the Lao capital Vientiane and began operations in 2021—China-led or China-participated transnational connectivity projects are creating networks that connect an increasing number of countries to broader patterns of economic development.
The common feature of these projects is straightforward: they begin with the goal of reducing transportation costs and expanding trade, allowing all participating parties to derive economic benefits from improved infrastructure.
Against this backdrop, a comparison with the way the United States—the world’s only superpower—has managed relations with some of its neighboring countries reveals a markedly different approach.
In the Caribbean, the United States has imposed an economic, financial, and trade embargo on Cuba since 1962, meaning the policy has now been in place for more than six decades. According to figures released by the Cuban government in September 2025, the embargo had caused cumulative losses of more than US$170.6 billion at current prices.
Since 1992, the United Nations General Assembly has annually considered and passed draft resolutions calling for an end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba. In October 2025, the resolution passed for the 33rd time, with 165 countries voting in favor and seven against. The United States has continued to reject the resolutions and in August 2026 again announced an extension of its embargo on Cuba.
Along the southern border, the United States has since 2017 pursued construction of a barrier along the roughly 3,200-kilometer U.S.-Mexico border. The Biden administration temporarily halted the project, but the Trump administration resumed construction in 2025. In August 2026, construction even extended into Texas’s Big Bend National Park, before being halted following widespread criticism.
To the north, trade tensions between the United States and Canada, traditionally close allies, have continued to escalate. In July 2025, the United States raised tariffs on Canadian goods from 25 percent to 35 percent. In July 2026, it announced an additional 50 percent tariff on selected Canadian goods worth approximately US$20 billion. Canada responded in August by imposing retaliatory tariffs on more than 700 U.S. products worth C$27.6 billion, sending relations between the two countries to a low point.
In the Arctic, the United States’ strategic moves regarding Greenland have also attracted considerable attention. Trump first proposed purchasing Greenland in 2019 and revived the idea after returning to the White House in 2025, even publicly discussing the possibility of using military force. In September 2026, the United States signed a security agreement with Denmark and Greenland, after which Trump claimed that the agreement gave the United States “permanent control” over Greenland’s security affairs.
On one side is the construction of canals, railways, and other infrastructure designed to reduce transaction costs and expand shared economic interests through connectivity. On the other is the construction of walls, the imposition of tariffs, economic blockades, and efforts to secure exclusive control in pursuit of unilateral advantage.
The contrast between these approaches to relations with neighboring countries speaks for itself.
What Connectivity Makes Possible
At its core, infrastructure is about reducing the cost of movement—between people and goods, between supply and demand, and between producers and markets.
The value of a canal lies not in its sheer scale or engineering grandeur, but in how many people it connects to markets and how many economies it gives a greater opportunity to share in prosperity.
The Pinglu Canal’s journey from a century-old concept to a major modern infrastructure project, and the increases in trade and industrial integration it is already expected to bring to the relationship between southwestern China and ASEAN, illustrate a simple principle: the shared interests created by connectivity are far more durable than the short-term gains that can be extracted through zero-sum competition.
As more countries become integrated into global production and supply chains through infrastructure connectivity and share in the benefits of economic development, blockades and barriers that isolate one country from another may increasingly appear out of step with the realities of an interconnected world.
Mutual benefit and shared prosperity are the broader historical trend, while zero-sum hegemony finds little lasting support. This is not merely a slogan. It is a reality being written, day after day, by the cargo vessels moving through the Pinglu Canal.
Editor: Grace
