HOHHOT, June 2 (Xinhua) -- At least two railways will cross north China's East Ujimqin Plain in Inner Mongolia to break a bottleneck on trade across the China-Mongolia border in the next two years.
"The railways, totaling more than 1,300 km in length, will start from Fuxin, of Liaoning Province, and Tongliao, Inner Mongolia, and end at Zhuengadabuqi Port," said Uliji, party chief of the East Ujimqin Banner (County) Government.
"Zhuengadabuqi", meaning "oriental threshold" in Mongolian, is an old business route, where traders from China and Mongolia dealt in tea, furs and horses in ancient times.
The modern town is an inland port for China-Mongolia trade, with a turnover of 500,000 tonnes of goods in 2009.
Uliji anticipated the amount would soar to 15 million tonnes in the next three or four years, making Zhuengadabuqi an important port for border trade.
"Railway access to the port is the precondition for this," he said.
The plan was designed to break the bottleneck for China-Mongolia and China-Russia trade, said an official with the region's railway construction headquarters.
Among 19 ports in Inner Mongolia, only Manzhouli and Erenhot are railway ports, and they cannot meet the huge demand.
Although the China-Mongolia trade rocketed from 243 million U.S. dollars in 1998 to 2.44 billion U.S. dollars in 2008, the cargo volume in Erenhot, the largest port between the two countries, has declined since 2006 because of low railway capacity.
Strong demand has triggered the railway construction over the past few years. Apart from lines to Zhuengadabuqi, a 700-km line from Linhe in western Inner Mongolia, to Ceke, on the Sino-Mongolian border, opened at the end of 2009, and another line connecting western Inner Mongolia's Jinquan to Ganqimaodu with a length of 135 km, is also included in the 2010 plan.
