(Vibrant China) Guangxi builds a highland for two-way interconnected trade, and land and sea transportation brings "ASEAN flavor"

[ASEAN Special Line] (Vibrant China) Guangxi builds a two-way trade highland, and land and sea transportation brings "ASEAN flavor"

China News Service, Nanning, October 14 (Yu Jing Li Jiawei) "We have turned the vision of the '365-day never-ending China-ASEAN Expo (CAEXPO)' into reality." Lu Chunmei, co-general manager of the China-ASEAN Specialty Commodity Center, said in an interview on the 13th that since its opening in September 2022, the center has held about 300 online and offline business activities, and more than 6,000 kinds of specialty products are on display here year-round, continuing to amplify the spillover effect of the China-ASEAN Expo.

The aforementioned center has 18 national cultural themed pavilions, covering ASEAN countries pavilions, "Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement" (RCEP) member states and special thematic pavilions. The pavilions bring together Vietnamese coffee, Indonesian lemongrass essential oil and other good products and regional cultural scenes from various countries. Chinese and foreign merchants come here to view goods and look for business opportunities.

Lu Chunmei introduced that the center provides resource matching, small language translation, AI packaging and other services for ASEAN companies that intend to enter the Chinese market and Chinese companies that plan to go overseas, and builds a two-way economic and trade "reception room".

Guangxi is an important channel and distribution center for ASEAN fruits exported to China. ASEAN fruits are distributed throughout the country and local fruits are also exported to ASEAN.

Lu Chunmei said that the China-ASEAN (Nanning) Fruit Trading Center has been established in the China-Singapore Nanning International Logistics Center and is under construction. Once completed and put into use, it will attract fruit suppliers of ASEAN origin and Chinese wholesalers to settle in and rely on the park's high-standard warehousing and direct port services to realize operations.

Guangxi has turned "short-term exhibitions" into "perennial business". The continuous expansion of the aforementioned business platforms is inseparable from the expansion and upgrading of freight channels.

At the Nanning International Railway Port, rows of China-Vietnam trains loaded with stones and fiberboards departed from here and headed south along the New Western Land-Sea Corridor to the ASEAN market; the Pinglu Canal was completed and opened to navigation, and multimodal transport made it easy to go to sea. Trains and cargo ships carried the "ASEAN flavor" together.

Data show that since the Nanning International Railway Port launched the China-Vietnam train on a regular basis in November 2017, as of October 12 this year, a total of more than 110,000 TEUs of goods have been sent. The freight volume of the train has grown steadily. The categories of exported goods have reached 455. The source of goods radiates to 25 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) in China, and overseas covers Vietnam, Laos and other ASEAN countries.

Liao Mingliang, deputy general manager of Nanning International Railway Port Investment and Development Co., Ltd., said that this year, the port area plans to invest 28.96 million yuan to expand the container disassembly area and upgrade supporting facilities such as freight parking lots to continue to improve the railway freight distribution capacity for ASEAN.

At present, the seaward transportation system with the Pinglu Canal as the link and the Western Land-Sea Corridor as the traction is accelerating. According to the Department of Transportation of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, goods in southwest China go to sea through the Pinglu Canal, which shortens the inland voyage by more than 560 kilometers compared with the traditional route. The comprehensive logistics cost is reduced by 18% to 30%, and social transportation costs can be saved by more than 5 billion yuan every year.