Yangtze River becomes world's busiest shipping river

The Yangtze River has become the world's busiest navigable river, according to China Youth Daily. Along with the deepening of China's opening up policy, the number of the foreign ships that sail into the Yangtze River, Asia's largest river, increased sharply from an average of hundreds per year at the beginning of the reforms up to an average of hundreds per day.
Statistics from the Changjiang Pilot Center show that the center has accumulated pilot work of more than 360,000 ships since the Yangtze River opened. In 2009, the number of ships reached over 50,000, of which foreign ships numbered, 37,500, accounting for almost 70 percent.
The rapid increase of foreign ships led to an average double-digit yearly growth of the annual volume of goods transported, rotation volume of goods transported and the port throughput in the Yangtze River.
In 2009, the volume of goods transported on the main lines of the Yangtze River reached 1.33 billion tons, more than 60 percent of the national total volume of goods transported in inland rivers, two times than that of the Mississippi River in the United States, three times than that of Europe’s Rhine river, and the Yangtze River has outranked inland rivers for five consecutive years.