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A new international transit port is taking shape at Daxie Island, 40 km from Ningbo City in east China's Zhejiang Province, following the country's lift to allow foreign vessels to visit the island.
The island, with an area of 30.84 square kilometers and a population of 20,000, has been developed for the past 10 years by the China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC), a prominent state-owned investment and finance company.
Close to international shipping routes, it will contain 30 berths for ships with dead weight tonnage (DWT) ranging from 5,000 to 300,000.
Over the past decade, CITIC has spent over one billion yuan (about 121 million US dollars) on building infrastructure on the island, such as hotels, business offices and facilities connectingthe island to the mainland.
At the eastern part of the island, six special berths have beenbuilt so far for oil and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), while in the western part, docks have been constructed for containers and transport of sundry goods, local sources said.
The island is now home to over 100 projects financed by domestic and overseas investors. For instance, British Petroleum (BP), one of the world's top 500 companies, has completed a LPG station in the island's development zone in cooperation with a local company.
The BP-backed underground cave-style LPG storage station, the second of its kind in China, is capable of storing 500,000 cubic meters of LPG at a time and will be able to produce one million tons of LPG annually.
In 2002, the island generated a total 5.3 billion yuan (639 million US dollars) in gross domestic product (GDP) and conducted foreign trade worth over 600 million US dollars, said a senior official with the management committee for the Daxie Island Economic and Technological Development Zone.
The official predicted that the island will gain an annual capacity to handle ships and boats with a combined 40 million DWT in two years.
(Xinhua News Agency March 14, 2003)
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