The plan includes a grandiose scheme for an expressway, possibly in a tunnel, to link Beijing to Taipei, the capital of arch-rival Taiwan, 120 kilometers across the Taiwan Strait. It would dwarf the longest undersea tunnel in the world today, which links the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido in Japan. The Seikan Tunnel, at 53.8 kilometers, took 26 years to build. Only 23 kilometers of the US$7 billion (HK$54.6 billion) tunnel are underwater.

The National Expressway Plan was unveiled by the Minister of Communications, Zhang Chunxian, in Beijing on Thursday. About one billion of China's 1.3 billion people would be covered by the expressway network, Zhang said, adding that the State Council, China's cabinet, has approved it.

The 29-kilometre Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge, planned to cross the mouth of the Pearl River at a cost of US$1.9 billion, is included as a project that would help to reduce logistics costs in Hong Kong, drive up the territory's prosperity and integrate the SAR more firmly into Pearl River Delta.

The economic benefits of highway construction are dramatic. In addition to linking the nation together socioeconomically in a very real sense, for instance the United States national expressway system, completed in 1956, is estimated to have reduced gross producer costs by more than US$1 trillion over the next 40 years, more than three times the original investment, according to a study by the American Highway Users Alliance. The same study estimates that about a quarter of the US productivity increase from 1950 to 1989 was attributable to increased investment in the highway system, which cut traffic fatalities by 60 per cent over the rest of the system. It is estimated that over the 40 years covered by the study, the interstate highways saved as many as 187,000 lives from traffic deaths.

While cities like Beijing and Shanghai today are encircled by ring roads and bisected by elevated freeways, much of rural China is still accessible only by rudimentary tracks and footpaths.

Accordingly, China's leaders, led by the former premier, Zhu Rongji, embarked on a feverish crusade to increase its road network, which was virtually non-existent as late as 1980. Zhang said that of the 85,000-kilometer network, 29,000 kilometers are already in use and another 16,000 are under construction. That leaves some 40,000 kilometers to be built over the next 25 years, most of it concentrated on the central and western regions.

From now to 2010, Zhang said, annual investment will average 140 billion to 150 billion yuan, falling to about 100 billion annually between 2010 and 2020.

Funds are to come from various sources including state tax on motor vehicles, local taxation, through issuing treasury bonds, and from private and foreign investors, Zhang said.

The 85,000 kilometers of national expressway are projected to consist of seven trunk lines linking Beijing to other major cities including Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau through nine southwest and 18 east-west lines. That would include the so-called Beijing-Taipei expressway, which in fact would link Beijing to Fuzhou, the provincial capital of Fujian, through Tianjin, Jinan, the provincial capital of Shandong, and Hefei the provincial capital of Anhui.

Zhang said that at some future time, when the three direct links of mail, transportation and trade between the two sides are established across the Taiwan Strait, the mainland and Taiwan can discuss connecting their expressway networks.

At first, the state-run Xinhua News Agency quoted Zhang as saying ferries are an option for the link. But some time later, the connection could be through construction of a cross-strait tunnel or other project, Zhang said without elaborating.

In recent years, engineers in Beijing have insisted a cross-strait tunnel is feasible technically, political issues aside. But others including economists object, saying it is hardly economically efficient.

Transport through the Hokkaido-Honshu tunnel in Japan, for instance, costs nearly as much as it does to fly.

``It is just a technical problem of how the highways on the two sides would be connected - by ferry, though a bridge or tunnel or by other means,'' said a Taiwan affairs researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Although indirect trade between the mainland and Taiwan is expanding rapidly, Taipei has refused to open direct links out of concern for the island's security and in fear that by doing so it would have to recognise Beijing's ``one China'' policy. The fact that, in the absence of direct links, Beijing is including the Beijing-Taipei expressway simply shows that ``Beijing wants to state its stance that Taiwan is part of China,'' the researcher said.

zhong.wu@globalchina.com