Cross-Strait infrastructure between China and Taiwan

The South China Morning Post reported Aug. 5 that in its recently approved National Highway Network Plan for 2013-2030, the State Council included two highway projects linking Taiwan to the mainland. One involves the long-proposed Beijing-Taipei Expressway, which would start in Beijing and pass through Tianjin, Hebei, Shandong, Jiangsu, Anhui, Zhejiang and Fujian's Fuzhou before crossing the strait and reaching Taipei. Another inland route would start in Chengdu and pass through Guizhou, Hunan, Jiangxi and Fujian's Xiamen, crossing the Taipei-administered Kinmen archipelago before eventually ending at Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan.

The plan does not specify what kind of infrastructure — a bridge or a tunnel, for example — would be used to connect the mainland to Taiwan over the 180-kilometer (111-mile) strait, but since 1996, if not earlier, Beijing has publicly called for such infrastructure to be built. One proposal involved a 122-kilometer undersea tunnel, which was deemed preferable because of its relative seismic stability and its location in shallower water. This tunnel would connect Fujian province's Pingtan Island to Hsinchu in northern Taiwan and would cost an estimated 400 billion-500 billion yuan ($65 billion-$81 billion) to build. Another proposal involved linking Taiwan's southern Chiayi county to the outlying island of Kinmen via tunnel or bridge.

Besides the massive economic costs associated with building a bridge or tunnel across the Taiwan Strait, security concerns, geologic vulnerabilities (due to earthquakes) and the sheer width of the strait present technical challenges to the project's construction. Though this infrastructure seems unlikely to be built anytime soon, Beijing and Taipei did finalize an agreement to build a pipeline to supply water from the mainland to Kinmen, an outlying Taiwanese island less than 3 kilometers from the coast at Fujian. This water pipeline would be the first cross-strait infrastructure link. Beijing hopes that enhanced economic integration and the physical infrastructure it wants to build one day across the Taiwan Strait could bring the country a step closer to fulfilling a core geopolitical imperative by reuniting with the island.