The Port of Lianyungang used to be an old port area with only three terminals, 50,000-ton waterway and five 10,000-ton berths. After 40 years’ expansion, the port now has a 300,000-ton waterway and 70 10,000-ton berths. Its cargo throughput has increased to 230 million tons, ranking among the top 100 container ports in the world.
Since the opening of the New Eurasian Land Bridge, Lianyungang has undertaken 50 percent of the transit shipping volume, the most convenient seaport for the central and western regions of China and Central Asian countries.
The Lianyungang Economic and Technological Development Zone was listed among first batch of state-level development zones in 1984. Since then, the city has made use of more than $10 billion of foreign capital. The trade volume leapfrogged to $8.21 billion last year, up from the $21 million in 1990.
Shenghong refinery and petrochemical integration project, with a total investment of 77.5 biilion yuan, has started in Xuwei New District, bringing the total investment in Lianyungang’s major port projects to exceed 200 billion yuan and driving the investment scale of the city’s industrial projects to hundreds of billion yuan.
Compared with that in 1978, Lianyungang’s GDP has grown 251 times, and the city’s fiscal revenue has increased 114 times, according to Xiang Xuelong, secretary of the CPC Lianyungang Municipal Committee.
The city has cultivated three mega industrial clusters of petrochemical, metallurgical and high-end equipment manufacturing, each worth of more than 100 billion yuan. It has also nurtured a batch of characteristic industries worth of tens of billions yuan. The city has made great progress in its comprehensive economic strength, Xiang said.
