A waterway transport route between Jining in East China's Shandong province and Wanzhou, Southwest China's Chongqing municipality, started operations on Oct 15.

The waterway, which spans more than 2,000 kilometers, starts from Tuokou Port in Wanzhou, passes through seven provinces and 32 cities, and ends at the Longgong Port Area of Jining. It takes more than 20 days to complete the one-way journey.

Jining is known as the "City of Canals". Jining has in recent years been focused on its goals of building a 100-million-metric ton port, handling a million TEUs, and creating a 100-billion-yuan ($13.67 billion) industry. As such, it has been constructing three major 100-ton port groups and five major operating entities. In the first three quarters of this year, the city's port throughput was 51.78 million tons, the highest among the province's inland river ports and the fourth highest among the province’s ports.

The route is expected to transport nearly 2 million tons of cargo each year, further strengthen Jining's inland shipping advantages and effectively promote trade circulation, exchanges and cooperation between Shandong province and Chongqing municipality and cities along the route.

Wanzhou is the eastern gateway of the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle, and Wanzhou Port is one of the three core port areas in Chongqing.

Over the past 14 years, Jining and Wanzhou have given full play to their location resource advantages and vigorously developed the modern port and shipping industry.

The opening of the river multimodal transport route will encourage the two cities to better integrate themselves into major national strategies such as the Belt and Road Initiative, the Yangtze River Economic Belt, and the Grand Canal Cultural Belt, open up new channels for navigation between the two places, and deepen East-West cooperation.