Highway service facilitates transport between ASEAN, western China

CHONGQING, April 29 (Xinhua) -- Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality has seen over 8,800 truck departures via its cross-border highway freight service between its launch and the end of April, local authorities said.

The service had delivered 19,804 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) containers by April 28, with a total cargo weight of 146,300 tonnes worth about 5.3 billion yuan (about 800 million U.S. dollars), said the Chongqing highway logistics base.

Launched in April 2016, Chongqing's cross-border highway freight service mainly caters to countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It has greatly shortened transportation times compared with traditional sea freight.

The freight service currently operates nine routes to ASEAN and Central Asian countries. It utilizes more than 30 overseas distribution warehouses in Southeast Asian countries including Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

Chongqing, an inland city on the fast track of China's new round of opening up, saw its foreign trade exceed 800 billion yuan in 2021, an increase of 22.8 percent from the previous year.