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electrification or ports.
8.
Over the past year since the Kong Xun delegation returned to
China the various parties have kept in touch with each other eg
during the visit to China by a UK business delegation under the
leadership of Lord Nelson (Chairman of GEC and the then President of
the Sino-British Trade Council) in November 1982 and a visit by a
BLMA delegation to China in April 1983, but there has been little tangible progress and we remain uncertain how much priority the
Chinese attach to this project in comparison with say coal projects
elsewhere in China. There have also been reports that the Chinese
are considering building a slurry pipeline rather than a railway (although there are technical problems in pipelines of such a
length) or even that instead of exporting the coal they would use to
generate electricity locally and to promote economic development in the region.
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