URUMQI, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region will spend more than 200 billion yuan (29.2 billion U.S. dollars) building or improving roads this year, according to local authorities.
Constructions of the roads, with a total planned length of 82,300 km, will start in 2017 including nearly 7,300 km of expressways and 41,800 km of rural roads, according to the regional transport department.
Gao Jianghuai, the Communist Party of China chief of the department, said that authorities would work to assure that a skeleton of 10,000 km of expressways would be finished by 2020.
Xinjiang plans to spend 1 trillion yuan in transport infrastructure, including over 470 billion yuan in expressways, from 2016 to 2020.