The Past and Present Lives of China Dredging
Our country is the earliest civilization country that excavates canal, dredge river and communicates river system by artificial dredging method to develop shipping, flood discharge and irrigation. In the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States Period, great projects of canal excavation began. Some of them are still playing an important role today, such as Dujiangyan in Guanxian County of Sichuan Province, Lingqu in Guangxi, and the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. The Dujiangyan project excavated and built by Li Bing and his son, the governor of Qin Dynasty, was not only unrivalled in the world at that time, but also a treasure of today's science. The Dujiangyan Project is still playing an important role in the agricultural irrigation of Sichuan Plain until now.
From the dredging tools, as early as the Song Dynasty invented "dredging rake", "iron broom", "scraping dragon", "dredging river iron and tribulus" and other maintenance tools for disturbance dredging. These advanced production tools were not available in Europe at that time.
The long backward feudal society, especially the modern semi-feudal and semi-colonial society, fundamentally hindered the development of the productive forces. Our science and technology changed from advanced to backward. Before liberation, there was a big gap between the level of dredging equipment and dredging technology owned by our country and that of advanced European and American countries.
After the founding of New China in 1949, dredging, like other economic fronts, began to be resumed and developed. Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou and other ports have successfully carried out maintenance dredging to ensure the normal operation of all ports in China. Tanggu New Port, built in 1952, is a 10,000-ton channel and harbor pool dug out of the silt flats. On the Sichuan River adopted the method of consolidation and dredging, the combination of blasting reefs to carry out a large scale of the whole line of consolidation, so that the dangerous, urgent, shallow water into the river into the road. The large-scale development of port construction, especially coastal deep-water harbor construction, has put forward unprecedented new requirements for dredging work, and our transportation dredging business has developed rapidly.
Since 1973, the Waterway Bureau under the Ministry of Communications introduced a large number of advanced dredgers in a few years, especially the large rake suction boats and cutter suction boats suitable for operation in estuaries and coastal areas, which rapidly expanded the dredging project and its scale and ensured the smooth completion and operation of coastal port construction. The successful opening of the artificial navigation trough into the Yangtze River Estuary of Shanghai harbor in 1975 and its successful maintenance indicated that the level of dredging technology in our country began to enter a new period of improving and catching up with the international advanced levels. Our dredging capacity has jumped to the forefront of the world. After 1981, we successfully entered the international dredging market, and over the past ten years, we have gained a good reputation.
