Full text: China's Rural Roads in the New Era
Xinhua | November 29, 2024
II. Building Rural Roads Accessible to Every Household
Easy access to convenient roads brings happiness to the doorstep. To improve the layout of villages and townships, encourage rural economic growth, and meet the needs of rural people for safe and easy travel, China has steadily developed its rural transport infrastructure and resolved any problems encountered through hard work and perseverance. Trudging through dust and mud on dirt roads has become a thing of the past; cement roads leading to every household have made bus services available for all – a dream come true.
1. Building a Rural Road Network Connecting Villages, Towns and Townships
Over the past decade, notable achievements have been made in the construction of rural roads in China. While the total length has increased, technical standards and accessibility have also significantly improved.
Marked increase in length. Upgraded and newly-built rural roads have added up to over 2.5 million km over the past decade. By the end of 2023, the total length of rural roads reached 4.6 million km, an increase of 21.7 percent over 2013, enough to circle the equator 115 times. A total of 700,000 km of county roads, 1.24 million km of township roads and 2.66 million km of village roads had been built. There were a total of 530,000 highway bridges and 2,222 tunnels in rural areas. A rural transport infrastructure network in which county roads connect rural and urban areas, township roads crisscross, and village roads facilitate travel between households and farmland is in place.
Rising technical standard. By the end of 2023, there were 4.45 million km of graded rural roads2, making up 96.8 percent of the total rural roads. Paved roads measured 4.22 million km and accounted for 91.8 percent of the total rural roads, representing an increase of 11.9 and 27.2 percentage points respectively over the past 10 years.
Increasing accessibility. Where conditions are right, paved roads have been built in about 30,000 towns and townships and over 500,000 administrative villages (see Panel 1). The construction of paved roads has been gradually completed in natural villages (or household groups) with relatively large populations. They have also been built in rural tourist destinations, industrial parks, sources of resources and minerals, and other points of economic growth. This makes travel in remote areas and particularly in mountainous areas more convenient.
2. Achieving the Goal with Good Planning and a Progressive Approach
In order to serve the national development strategy and rural economic and social development needs, China has set well-conceived goals, tasks, and roadmaps for steady and orderly rural road development, with good planning and coordination.
Systematic planning. Medium- and long-term plans are the basis for the continuous and sound development of rural roads. One of the goals of the Plan for Rural Road Construction released in 2005 and the Outline of Poverty Alleviation-Oriented Transport Projects in Contiguous Poverty-Stricken Areas (2011-2020) issued in 2013 was to connect towns, townships and administrative villages where conditions allow with asphalt (cement) roads by 2020. Another was to build paved roads within these locations, a basic transport requirement in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and to step up road construction in impoverished areas.
The Outline for Medium- and Long-term Development of Rural Roads issued in 2021 set the goal of building a convenient and efficient trunk road network and an inclusive and equitable basic road network in rural areas, offering guidance to rural road construction and development on the new journey towards a modern socialist country. The Outline for National Territorial Space Planning (2021-2035) released in 2022 guided the design of rural roads linking industrial parks and tourist destinations, and strengthened the impact of rural roads on cultural and tourist resources and distinctive local businesses.
Orderly construction. China has formulated five-year development plans for rural roads under the guidance of medium- and long-term plans. Well-planned development goals and key tasks for different periods have been set (see Panel 2). To build higher-quality roads for greater connectivity, it has phased in road upgrading, road safety improvement, and networked road construction, and taken region- and category-specific measures to develop rural roads in accordance with local conditions. All of this has helped to improve rural road service capacity and standard.
3. No Region Should Be Left Behind Because of Inadequate Road Coverage
Transport should serve the people. Meeting the people's aspiration for a better life should always be the goal in rural road development. Coordinated and balanced development should be emphasized so that people can share the benefits of improved transport and that no region is left behind due to poor road access.
Promoting balanced development of rural roads between regions. China is a vast country with extensive rural areas, the level of development varying from region to region. The government has lent differentiated policy support in rural road development to the central region, western region, and deeply impoverished areas, setting different priorities and giving them preferential policies in regard to investment as more roads are built in counties that have just emerged from poverty, counties requiring government support in rural revitalization, underdeveloped areas, mountainous areas, and ethnic minority areas, reducing imbalances in rural road development between regions.
Narrowing the gap between rural and urban roads. China has steadily improved rural road quality, launching projects to harden road surfacing, renovate roads with a shallow subgrade or surface, build Grade III roads in towns and townships and two-lane roads in administrative villages, connect towns and townships to county and provincial arterial roads, and renovate old county and township roads. These efforts have improved the basic and trunk road networks in rural areas, gradually narrowing the gap between rural and urban roads.
Ensuring transport accessibility in far-flung mountainous areas. Replacing zip lines with bridges and building new roads can open the door to prosperity for people living deep in the mountains. To guarantee safe travel for people living in remote mountainous areas, China channeled special funds to replace zip lines with bridges, significantly improving these regions' access to the outside world after three years' hard work (see Panel 3). It has stepped up the effort to build rural roads for regions inhabited by ethnic groups skipping development stages to directly enter socialist society in Yunnan Province and by ethnic groups with smaller populations, breaking the transport bottleneck for them and accelerating their progress out of poverty and towards prosperity.
4. Pursuing Green Development of Rural Roads Guided by Policy Measures and Technical Standards
Guided by policy measures and technical standards and with strengthened supervision, China aims to pursue green development of safe, durable and high-quality rural roads.
Strengthening institutional guarantee. Regulation systems offer a legal framework for rural road development. Departmental regulations and policies such as Administrative Measures for Rural Road Construction, Administrative Measures for Rural Road Quality, and Instructions on Improving the Quality and Durability of Rural Road Engineering have been rolled out to provide an effective institutional guarantee for the whole process of construction from responsibility assignment, project planning, fund raising, and road building, to quality control, safety management and check and acceptance.
Meeting technical standards. To bring rural roads up to standard under the guidance of Technical Standard of Highway Engineering and Technical Standard of Low Volume Rural Highway Engineering, China has strictly followed industry standards or local construction standards in terms of choice of technical grade, traffic volume, design speed, routes, subgrade, road surface, and safety facilities, while giving consideration to different topographic and geomorphic conditions. The width of rural roads is generally at least 4.5 meters, and over 87 percent of them have a high-grade surface (asphalt or cement).
Ensuring durability. China prioritizes quality in rural road construction, embracing the concept of whole-process quality and safety management, and enforcing systems directing legal person accountability, tenders and bids, project supervision, and contract management. Rural road projects are delivered in strict accordance with the construction blueprints, and any jerry-building is investigated and punished. Vocational training and technical guidance have been intensified for construction workers to improve quality control. Quality inspection has been strengthened by launching annual sampling inspection on rural roads and giving particular attention to quality supervision of road safety facilities. A lifelong accountability system for road quality has been put in place.
China has strengthened supervision and evaluation of project quality and made information available to the public regarding construction plans, subsidy policies, tenders and bids, construction management, quality supervision, use of funds, and project inspection and acceptance. It has established a credit evaluation mechanism focusing on road quality, and the credit is referred to in market access, tenders and bids, and industry supervision.
Seeking green development. Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets. China upholds and acts on a vision of healthy, sustainable, and green development, building green rural roads which are resource-saving, environment-friendly, energy-efficient, and provide quality service. It sticks to economical and intensive use of resources and strictly protects land resources. Great efforts have been made in recycling waste and scrap. It has adopted environment-friendly designs and enforced the red lines for eco-environmental conservation to ensure harmony between roadscapes and nature. Life-cycle cost analysis is observed in standardized construction. Charging facilities, service stations, and roadside scenic lookouts are built depending on local conditions to provide people with green and convenient travel experience.
2 Graded roads refer to expressways, and Grade I, Grade II, Grade III and Grade IV highways as categorized in the Technical Standard of Highway Engineering.