Pinglu Canal underscores China's turn toward Southeast Asia

At the foot of green hills where farmers raise chickens and cultivate jasmine tea and rice, construction workers have been putting the final touches on an infrastructure project that policymakers hope will bring new growth to the southern Chinese region of Guangxi and neighboring inland provinces.

Most of the massive trade China conducts with other nations flows through ports and airports along the country’s long and prosperous eastern coast, particularly at the mouths of the Yangtze and Pearl rivers. Opening after four years of construction, the new Pinglu Canal is intended to divert some of China’s east-west trade flows toward the country’s short southern coast and intensify economic connections with Southeast Asia, which in recent years has overtaken both North America and Europe to become the country’s biggest trading partner.

Dubbed by officials as the “project of the century,” the new north-south link will enable cargo ships to turn south from the Xi River, which flows east into the Pearl River Delta, and reach the sea more quickly at the Beibu Gulf, known outside China more commonly as the Gulf of Tonkin.

During a visit last month to Qinzhou, where the canal reaches the Beibu, excavators were removing sediment from the riverbed while cranes swung concrete panels into position to line the new channel. Trucks carrying cement and construction materials clogged nearby roads.

Fisher Tan Hui has already been diverted. Access to the stretch of the Xi where he has long made a living catching fish near Hengzhou, where the canal starts, has been restricted for construction work, so lately he has been ferrying tourists around instead.

“I took seven people out for a two-hour boat ride along the canal yesterday,” Tan said. “I hope more tourists will come.”

Chances are high as the authorities are publicly showcasing the Pinglu as a great feat of engineering, comparing it to the opening of the Grand Canal—which still runs from Beijing almost all the way to Shanghai—more than 1,000 years ago.

While the Pinglu is less than a 10th as long as the Grand Canal, it was completed just four years after construction began. This impressive pace contrasts with the halting advance of canal projects involving Chinese interests in Southeast Asia and other regions. Yet the question of payback on China’s RMB 72.7 billion (USD 10.8 billion) investment in the Pinglu barely enters into discussion.

For Beijing, which has funded Pinglu’s construction through state-owned policy and commercial banks, direct returns on investment are not the point, said Jean-Paul Rodrigue, a professor of maritime business administration at Texas A&M University at Galveston.

“You create accessibility and all sorts of spillover effects [like] new investment, new markets, new trade relations,” he said. “We’re talking about a decade or two in the future. Meanwhile, you have a very big infrastructure sunk cost.”

This year’s priority has been to complete the canal in time for the China-ASEAN Expo. “All localities and relevant departments in the region must go all out, fulfill their mission and leave no regrets,” was the message that came out of a meeting of regional Communist Party leaders last month.

Getting to this point has been a huge undertaking. Although the lower section of the Pinglu tracks the course of the Qin River out to the Beibu Gulf, the upper section was blasted through Guangxi’s mountainous interior. Some 315 million cubic meters of earth and rock were excavated from the hills and the channel of the Qin, enough to fill Beijing’s National Stadium 105 times.

All this digging still left the problem of smoothing out a 65-meter decline to sea level for boats traveling out into the gulf. To deal with this, engineers constructed three sets of hydraulic locks capable of lifting or lowering a loaded ship weighing up to 5,000 metric tons. The massive lock doors can snap shut in 30 seconds.

Key components of the locks’ hydraulic operating systems were designed and manufactured domestically. The canal project also produced significant technological breakthroughs, such as the vertical stacking of water-saving pools and the use of 3D printing to make the hydraulic gates’ control mechanisms, according to state media interviews with project engineers and researchers.

While China’s infrastructure building in recent decades has focused on highways, railways, dams, ports, and airports rather than waterways, groundwork for the Pinglu was laid by other recent projects such as the Jianghuai Canal.

The 355-kilometer waterway parallels a stretch of the Grand Canal and was completed in 2023 as part of a wide-ranging effort to shift water from the free-flowing Yangtze to rivers like the drier Huaihe in north China. Planners are currently evaluating plans for two more extended north-south canals: The Xianggui, which would link the Yangtze and the Xi rivers, and the Ganyue, which would connect the Yangtze and Pearl rivers.

Such ambitions have raised concerns about potential overbuilding. In an interview with Chinese media, Charles Guowen Wang, director of the Center for Logistics and Supply Chain Management at the China Development Institute in Shenzhen, said some proposed inland canals would involve “huge water resource consumption, inter-provincial coordination costs and high engineering investments. … We need to be realistic.”

Meanwhile, Chinese-backed canal projects overseas have made far less progress.

Two years ago, Chinese government officials and executives from state-owned China Bridge and Road Corporation joined Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet at a ceremony to break ground on the Funan Techo Canal, a USD 1.7 billion channel to run from Phnom Penh to the Cambodian coast.

The 180-kilometer canal, to be built by a China Bridge joint venture and scheduled for completion in 2028, would reduce Cambodia’s reliance on Vietnamese seaports along the Mekong River Delta and, in the eyes of some observers, give Beijing strategic leverage against Hanoi.

Although local officials announced last year that they had finalized the scope of work to be done, construction has yet to begin amid extended discussions over land rights and financing. On September 9, however, Cambodian officials signed an agreement in Xiamen, China, to receive around USD 1 billion in financing from the Export-Import Bank of China.

“The new Chinese financing could remove the biggest obstacle, but the real test now is whether we see compensation accelerate, contracts mobilized, heavy equipment deployed and sustained construction along substantial portions of the route,” said Ear Sophal, an associate professor of political economy at Arizona State University who studies Cambodia.

The government of neighboring Thailand in 2023 shelved a proposal backed by Chinese business interests to build a canal cutting across a narrow strip of land above the Malay Peninsula that would enable ships to bypass the Strait of Malacca. A year later, the Nicaraguan government revoked a concession granted to Chinese businessman Wang Jing to develop a USD 50 billion alternative to the Panama Canal after a decade of relative inactivity.

“Inside China, Beijing can mobilize financing, land, engineering capacity and political authority with extraordinary speed,” said James Borton, a senior fellow with Johns Hopkins University’s SAIS Foreign Policy Institute. “Overseas, even a strategically friendly country such as Cambodia introduces additional layers of sovereignty, financing, environmental review, compensation, domestic politics and relations with neighboring states.”

Back in Guangxi, the idea of building the Pinglu is credited to Sun Yat-sen, leader of the republican movement that brought down China’s imperial dynasty in 1911. In his 1920 book “The International Development of China,” Sun argued that the construction of a shipping channel to the Beibu port of Qinzhou would boost the economy of inland areas like the provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou.

In any case, the opening of the Pinglu should save companies in the area time and money. Compared with the current riverine route to Pearl River Delta ports like Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong, the canal will provide a 560-kilometer shortcut. This could translate into RMB 5.2 billion (USD 773.2 million) in annual savings, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

To add to the attraction, cargo ships will not be charged to transit the Pinglu’s locks for the rest of 2026. They are then to be charged RMB 1 (USD 0.15) per gross ton per lock. This compares with prices for auctioned slots to transit the locks of the Panama Canal which exceeded USD 2.5 million in some cases last month.

Chinese brokerage TF Securities estimated in a report two years ago that by 2035, the Pinglu Canal would bring 200 million tons of incremental annual freight volume to state-owned Beibu Gulf Port, whose portfolio includes Qinzhou as well as the nearby ports of Fangchenggang and Beihai.

This would represent a big jump from the 358 million tons of cargo the ports handled last year. The busiest terminal of Beibu Gulf Port, whose Shenzhen-listed shares have risen 27% over the past year, is operated by a joint venture with Singaporean state company PSA International.

Currently, trade between this corner of China and Southeast Asia is centered on bulk commodities, with coal, building materials and grain sent south and mineral resources coming north. Like local governments elsewhere in China, authorities in Guangxi in recent years have liberally doled out subsidies to incentivize high-tech manufacturing, but the results have been unimpressive.

Nanning, for example, extended financial support to electric vehicle maker Hozon New Energy Automobile, which set up a large factory not far from the Pinglu Canal. But despite aggressive marketing of its Neta-branded cars in Southeast Asia, Hozon racked up heavy losses and halted most production last year. The factory appeared dormant last month, with hundreds of uncompleted cars visible within.

Pinglu could potentially play a role in the accelerating shift of Chinese supply and production chains into Southeast Asia. Companies have been relocating operations both to take advantage of lower labor and other input costs in certain countries and to cope with heightened barriers to “Made in China” products in the US and other export markets.

“In the bigger picture, this strengthens ASEAN’s position in global supply chains as a cost-efficient manufacturing hub,” said Priyanka Kishore, director and principal economist at Asia Decoded, a Singapore-based research company.

Yet Southeast Asian governments may be starting to reconsider the merits of this kind of relationship.

“ASEAN governments face a delicate calculation,” Borton said. “They want the infrastructure and investment that come with deeper Chinese economic integration, but they do not necessarily want Southeast Asia to become the release valve for Chinese industrial overcapacity displaced from the US and European markets.”

Residents along the Pinglu, however, are hopeful the canal will generate new business opportunities.

“I am focusing on saving money so I can buy a house,” said Su Zixuan, a 20-year-old fish trader in Qinzhou. “I don’t know much about the canal, but I hope it makes this city develop faster.”

This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.

Note: RMB figures are converted to USD at rates of RMB 6.73 = USD 1 based on estimates as of September 15, 2026, unless otherwise stated. USD conversions are approximate and, where appropriate, rounded for ease of reference. They may not fully match prevailing exchange rates.