BEIJING, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- China is accelerating efforts to make its logistics network smarter and more connected, using data, automation and better multimodal links to cut the time and cost of moving goods across its vast manufacturing base.

The Pinglu Canal in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, scheduled to open in September, illustrates the push. For cargo from southwest China, the new route will shorten the inland waterway journey to the sea by about 560 km compared with the route via Guangzhou Port, with overall logistics costs estimated to fall by 18 to 30 percent.

The canal runs 134.2 km from the Xijiang River to the Beibu Gulf. Designed for vessels of up to 5,000 tonnes, the project has an estimated investment of 72.7 billion yuan (about 10.7 billion U.S. dollars) and is China's first river-to-sea canal project planned and coordinated at the national level since 1949.

Vessel trials on the canal were officially launched on Aug. 12. The trials use China's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System for positioning, along with drones and sensors, to collect data on vessel routes and movements, water currents and safe distances between ships.

The canal also uses about 262 km of high-speed fiber-optic cable laid along its two banks, together with a dedicated 5G network and edge computing. Vessel-recognition and video-analysis tasks can be handled close to where the data is generated, reducing end-to-end response times to the millisecond level.

Pinglu is a backbone project of the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor and is expected to further improve southwest China's access to the sea. China's trade with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations reached 5.14 trillion yuan in the first seven months of 2026, up 20 percent year on year.

At the national level, the logistics network is one of six networks prioritized during China's 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-2030), alongside water networks, new-type power grids, computing power networks, next-generation communication networks and urban underground pipeline networks.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has described the six networks as an integrated whole featuring deep interconnection, mutual empowerment and coordinated support. Investment in the six networks and key areas is preliminarily estimated to exceed 7 trillion yuan this year.

MUFG Research said the initiative could support demand, employment and industrial activity in the near term, while enhancing productivity over the medium to longer term.

These upgrades build on a logistics system serving the world's largest manufacturing sector by value added. China's manufacturing value added has ranked first globally for 16 consecutive years and accounted for more than 28 percent of the global total during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025).

China's express-delivery volume ranked first worldwide for a 12th consecutive year in 2025, when the country handled 198.95 billion parcels. Its ports also led the world in cargo and container throughput, at 18.3 billion tonnes and 354 million twenty-foot equivalent units, respectively.

The country's physical logistics backbone includes 181 national logistics hubs and 105 national backbone cold-chain logistics bases. Zhou Zhicheng, director of the research office at the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing, said the focus was shifting from the "hard construction" of hubs, parks and corridors toward the "soft connections" created by digital platforms, intelligent equipment and data.

Data sharing is one focus. In 2025, the NDRC and seven other agencies selected 16 cities, including Wuhan, for logistics-data interconnection pilots aimed at linking data across customs, ports, railways, roads, waterways, aviation, freight forwarders and vehicle fleets.

In Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, a multimodal platform integrates data from customs, ports, shipping companies and road transport operators. One importer said the platform's real-time data had helped cut its average logistics costs by 15 to 20 percent.

At Yangluo Port in Wuhan, waiting time for vessels to berth has been cut from about six hours to around two hours. Wuhan Customs and authorities in Shanghai now share regulatory data, allowing imports to move from overseas to Wuhan with one declaration, one inspection and one release.

YTO Express, which handled 31.1 billion parcels in 2025, is using automation at a smart logistics center within its northern headquarters base in Yongqing County, north China's Hebei Province. Average daily parcel throughput at the center has risen from 2 million in 2020 to 6.5 million, while artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled sorting accuracy has reached 99.99 percent.

YTO's transport cost per parcel fell 10.35 percent in 2025 to 0.37 yuan.

Nationwide, the ratio of total social logistics costs to gross domestic product (GDP) stood at 13.9 percent in the first half of 2026, down 0.1 percentage points from both the first quarter and a year earlier. The China Logistics Information Center said that, based on first-half GDP, the decline was equivalent to nearly 70 billion yuan in logistics-cost savings.

The total value of social logistics -- an official measure of the total value of goods involved in social logistics during a reporting period -- reached 181.1 trillion yuan in the first half, up 5.1 percent year on year. Logistics demand from high-tech manufacturing rose 13.3 percent, while that from digital product manufacturing increased 12.3 percent.

A 2026 Citi report on supply chains said AI would likely play an increasingly important role in supply chains, including tracking goods in transit, improving warehouse operations, optimizing routes and managing risks in real time.

China's goods trade reached 30.13 trillion yuan in the first seven months of 2026, up 17.3 percent year on year. In July, exports of high-tech products, including industrial robots and 3D printers, rose more than 50 percent year on year.

Multimodal links are another focus. An action plan for 2026-2030 aims to upgrade multimodal functions at around 1,000 major freight nodes and raise the share of multimodal cargo transfers completed within one hour to more than 90 percent.

DHL Express is also expanding its logistics infrastructure and air network in China. The company said on Aug. 11 that it had invested 177 million euros (about 206.7 million U.S. dollars) in expanding its Shenzhen "Super Gateway," its largest investment in the Chinese mainland to date. The expansion tripled processing capacity to about 900 tonnes a day.

DHL Express has also added a direct flight between Shanghai and Bangkok as part of a route that continues via Bahrain and Brussels before returning to Shanghai, increasing connectivity among manufacturing, sourcing and consumption markets across Asia, the Middle East and Europe.