New Silk Road helps wealth bloom in desert

Clear road ahead

To further boost trade and facilitate the customs clearance process, Horgos moved its land port to a new location.

The new land port is a key part of the 8,445 km transcontinental expressway linking Lianyungang in Jiangsu province to St. Petersburg in Russia.

The expressway opened on Sept 27 last year, along with the new Horgos land port, which can clear four container trucks simultaneously, instead of one at the old facility.

Since the expressway opened, the transportation time from Horgos to Almaty has been cut from 8.5 hours to 4.5 hours. The cost of transportation over the same route was slashed from $2,000 per container truck to $1,300, Yu said.

Intermediaries such as Jiudinglong Logistic at Horgos are also enjoying booming business due to the large volume of goods being moved.

Its parking area is packed with container trucks with Kazakhstan license plates waiting for their cargo to arrive. The company holds goods that are then loaded onto trucks and transported to Central Asian countries and Russia via the new expressway.

"When we launched the service in 2010, we handled about 1,000 to 2,000 metric tons of goods every month," said Xia Ruizhi, manager of the company.

"Now, we handle at least 10,000 tons of goods a month."

He said business was so good they are building a new holding facility near the land port.

"It was pretty obvious that the goods and trucks requiring our services surged after the Belt and Road Initiative was introduced," he said. "Also, it's very interesting to see that the volume of goods heading to certain Central Asian countries suddenly increases shortly after President Xi Jinping's visits to those countries."

Xia and his family moved to Horgos two years ago.

"The city's development was fast-tracked because of the initiative, and I am confident in its future," Xia said.

Thanks to the performances of 19 land ports around the region, the foreign trade volume in Xinjiang experienced healthy growth of 10.7 percent year-on-year during the first half of the year. The growth was 6.8 percentage points above the national rate over the same period, according to the General Administration of Customs.

Zhang Chunlin, standing vice-chairman of the regional government, said, "Xinjiang will develop an economic belt along the port areas so we can fully support further opening-up under the Belt and Road Initiative."

Agricultural products have become important items in Xinjiang's foreign trade. The region imported and exported 2.47 billion yuan ($350 million) of agricultural products during the first six months of this year, up 30.1 percent year-on-year, the customs administration added.