New initiative supports national protection in Yellow River Basin

Qingdao in East China's Shandong province recently adopted a new initiative to support a major national strategy for ecological protection and high-quality development in the Yellow River Basin.

The city's development and reform commission on May 10 released an action plan on its website for key tasks of the city to serve the national strategy.

Originating from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to the east coast of China, the Yellow River winds more than 5,400 kilometers and spans the eastern and western parts of northern China.

Shandong is the only coastal province among the nine provinces and regions in the Yellow River Basin, while Qingdao is the bridgehead for Shandong's opening-up to the world. The city is also a gateway to the river basin, which is expected to boost economic development and trade between China's eastern and western regions by connecting land and river areas.

According to the plan, Qingdao will make full use of these advantages, and strives to explore paths and set examples for the implementation of ecological protection and high-quality development in the Yellow River Basin.

The action plan laid out 38 measures in six aspects including the construction of a water-saving model city and the building of a new regional coordinated development pattern in the area.

By 2025, the city will form a framework of resource conservation and environmental protection in fields of industrial structure, production modes and lifestyles, in a bid to become a benchmark for ecological protection in the Yellow River Basin and an important pole for the area's high-quality growth.

Qingdao Customs, together with Urumqi Customs－which is involved in an important western channel of the river as well as 11 customs in nine provinces and regions along the river such as Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, Shaanxi and the Inner Mongolia autonomous region－has innovated a collaborative working mechanism and cooperation modes to better serve the opening-up of the basin.

The West Coast New Area of Qingdao has also led the nation in building a "nine plus two" cross-border e-commerce industrial cooperation and exchange mechanism as well as a supply-chain cluster of imported commodities to serve a consumer group of 510 million people. Nine refers to nine provinces and regions in the Yellow River Basin, and two refers to the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and Yunnan province.

It has also cooperated with three import trade promotion and innovation demonstration zones and 29 cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones to develop complete industrial chains in the sector.

On June 21, a high-level dialogue on ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin was held during the third Qingdao Multinationals Summit.

Li Fengli, general manager of Shandong Port Group, said at the dialogue that the group is focusing on the construction of a comprehensive corridor for land-sea linkage and east-west bidirectional aid. "The supply chain now plays a more important role in enterprise competition, and the function of ports is becoming indispensable to ensuring the stability of the supply chain and industrial chain," Li said.

Shandong Port is connecting seaports, land ports, airports and river ports to gather human resources, logistics and flows of information and capital, and to facilitate cooperation and opening-up of companies in the Yellow River Basin, he added.

By the end of 2021, the port group had developed 76 sea-rail combined transport routes and built 26 inland ports in the province. It also saw 2.56 million twenty-foot equivalent units of containers throughput by sea-rail transport in 2021, up 19.5 percent year-on-year.