Three Gorges Water Transport New Corridor: Gezhouba Shiplock Expansion Main Works Begin

This is a capacity story, not a construction milestone: the new lock targets 10,000-tonne-class vessels on a stretch that has long been the bottleneck in the Three Gorges waterway. For bulk commodity and RWA-linked logistics flows moving via the Yangtze, the constraint has always been throughput rather than demand, so added lock capacity is a structural input for inland freight economics. The open question is timing — cofferdams mark the start of main works, not completion, and how the corridor's capacity translates into actual transit volumes once operational remains to be seen.