At around 12:00 on August 6, with the hoisting of the last steel box girder of the mid-span closure section into place, the main bridge of the Quanzhou Bay Cross-Sea Bridge on the newly built Fuzhou-Xiamen High-Speed Railway (Fuxia HSR), China's first cross-sea high-speed railway bridge, was successfully closed, marking another solid step toward the Fuxia HSR's 2022 opening target.

The newly built Fuxia HSR is China's first cross-sea high-speed railway. Located in the coastal area of Fujian Province, it runs from Fuzhou in the north to Xiamen and Zhangzhou in the south, with a main line length of 277.42 km and a design speed of 350 km/h. The Quanzhou Bay Cross-Sea Bridge, a key controlling project of the entire line, has a total length of 20.287 km, including 8.96 km of sea bridge. It is a cable-stayed bridge with two towers, double cable planes, a steel-concrete composite girder and a semi-floating system, and is China's first cross-sea high-speed railway bridge.

Since construction began in 2017, the Quanzhou Maritime Safety Administration has taken the initiative and provided proactive services, guiding the construction unit to optimize construction plans for key stages and improve vessel traffic organization, and carrying out all-round, three-dimensional supervision of the bridge construction waters to ensure smooth construction of the bridge.

With the successful closure of the bridge, Fuxia HSR construction has entered its final sprint. As an important project to accelerate the building of the Maritime Silk Road under the Belt and Road Initiative and the construction of the Fujian Pilot Free Trade Zone, the bridge will, once completed and open to traffic, create a "one-hour living circle" between Fuzhou and Xiamen, effectively eliminate the railway "bottleneck" restricting China's southeastern coastal region, accelerate the rise of the two major metropolitan areas of Fuzhou and Xiamen-Zhangzhou-Quanzhou, and be of great significance to speeding up the economic and social development of the West Coast Economic Zone city cluster.