VLADIVOSTOK (Realist English). On November 16, traffic opened on the first ever railway bridge to China across the Amur River. The first freight train went to China on a section of the border of the two states near the settlement of Nizhneleninskoye of the Jewish Autonomous Region and Tongjiang of Heilongjiang Province.
The maximum capacity of the crossing will be up to 20 million tons of cargo per year. The distance of cargo transportation to the northern provinces of China has been reduced by more than 700 km compared to previously existing routes. This is a serious logistical breakthrough and a powerful incentive for economic development, the effect of which will be felt by at least 40 million people.
The importance of the Transsib increases significantly, as well as the requirements for its modernization and improvement of its capacity. This route changes not only the economic, but also the geopolitical vector of the country’s development.
The long-awaited project has been completed, the work on which was delayed due to issues on the Russian side. The Russians have been building their quarter of the railway bridge across the Amur in the Jewish Autonomous Region three years longer than Chinese bridge builders.
A few months earlier, the opening of a cross-border automobile bridge across the Amur River between the Russian Blagoveshchensk and the Chinese Heihe took place. Another bridge crossing “Jalinda— Mohe” is next in line, which will significantly increase the volume of coal and ore exports from the Primorye region.
It should be understood that with each new bridge, the growing transport network step by step is including Eastern Siberia in the sphere of industrial influence of the PRC. Without the presence of its own industrial centers of attraction, this can have not only positive, but also centrifugal consequences. There should be no Russian industrial vacuum in the Far East and Yakutia. We need new locomotive projects on the scale of the Vostochny cosmodrome. We need accelerated industrialization of the region with the construction of new technopolises in the taiga.
In Bolshoy Kamen, near Vladivostok, a giant shipyard of SSK Zvezda (Shipbuilding complex “Star”) has been built since 2009. Unfortunately, this project has been moving inexcusably slowly – since 2009, we have been building a plant for 13 years. The second stage has been delayed. It is characteristic that the general contractor is a Chinese company. Alas, instead of trying to create a state construction concern in Siberia, the authorities habitually decided that the “free market” would solve everything. And it has solved. Today, such a concern is sorely lacking in the region. At a facility of the “Star” scale, it could gain the capacity, infrastructure and competencies necessary for the construction of other regional facilities (housing, roads, enterprises). At the same time, the cost of work would decrease due to the pace gained. But it did not grow together in the minds of officials, so even Chinese workers are building bridges across the Amur.
In light of crossing of the Amur, the refusal to build a Russian bridge to Sakhalin this year also becomes a serious geopolitical challenge.
