Transport & Communications Qingdao is a comprehensive transport hub of China. From the national Medium and Long-term Development Planning of Comprehensive Transport Network, we can see that Qingdao locates on the main artery of south-north coastal transport and on the main artery of east-west Qingdao-Lhasa transport, and on South Asian section of the international region transport channels. In the next few years, Qingdao will focus on the construction of Qingdao-Taiyuan passenger railway line, quay for large-sized deep water specialized container and energy transportation of Qingdao port, the comprehensive transport hub jointed with expressway, passenger line and airport, goods collecting and distribution supporting system with Qingdao Port as a hub to mainly improve the collection and distribution capacity of railway, expressway and pipeline in the rear, and railway container transshipment hub to promote inland multi-modal transport development. Qingdao will also actively promote the development of urban public traffic, and gradually construct urban track traffic network. Qingdao had realized the direct air transportation with Taiwan in 2008. Qingdao port is a famous natural port mainly for loading and unloading containers, coal, crude oil, iron ore, food and other import and export goods and for international and domestic passenger service. As of today, it has formed three ports, namely old Qingdao port, Huangdao oil port and Qianwan new port. At present Qingdao port possesses 94 production berths including 59 above 10,000-ton levels, and the port handling capacity reaches 180 million tons. The Dongjiakou port is under development. Qingdao Liuting International Airport reaches 4E standard. It operates 860 domestic flights each week to 50 main Chinese cities, and 19 international (regional) passenger and cargo airlines directly to Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Seoul, Busan, Daegu, Paris (via Shanghai), seven European countries (via Beijing) and China Hong Kong. The direct airline to Taiwan was opened at the end of 2008. It handled 8.2 million person-times, and 130,000 tons of cargo and mail. Jiaozhou-Ji'nan railway connecting Qingdao with Ji'nan is a transport artery across Shandong. It was started in 1897, completed and opened to traffic in 1904. The railway was electrified in 2006. Since April 18, 2007, it started to run bullet trains at the speed of over 200 kilometers per hour; Jiaozhou-Ji'nan passenger railway line has been completed and will run bullet trains at the speed of 250 kilometers per hour. In 2008, Jiaozhou-Ji'nan railway handled 6.9 million person-times, and 26.1 million tons of cargo. Qingdao has a developed highway network. By the end of 2008, its highway traffic mileage reached 14,632 kilometers including 978 kilometers of first class highway. Qingdao possesses 11 expressways with a mileage of 702.8 kilometers, ranking first both in Shandong province and in fifteen sub-provincial cities of China in terms of the number, mileage and density of expressways. It has realized ?One-hour economic rim? in its city and basically reached the level of developed countries. Qingdao's post and communications industries have also growing rapidly. In 2008, the postal service turnover rose 16.9% to 16.61 billion yuan. Network and information technology continued to be widely popularized and upgraded. Internet users rose 20.6% to 1.494 million. By the end of the year, the total telephone switchboard capacity reached 2.925 million lines, fixed phone users totaled 3.312 million. As one of the first group of cities constructing TD experiment network, Qingdao's mobile telephone users totaled 6.255 million, 1.677 million of which are new in the year. The communications capacities had been greatly expanded.