China's fixed-asset investment in the transport sector reached 3.5 trillion yuan ($548.45 billion) last year, up 7.1 percent year-on-year, and the growth rate was the highest in the last three years, CCTV reported.

Overall, China's transport sector experienced stable recovery and continuous improvement of quality in 2020, Sun Wenjian, a spokesperson with the Ministry of Transport, told a news conference on Thursday.

Some major indicators went through a V-shaped recovery, Sun said. Since May 2020, the cumulative growth of fixed-asset investment in the transport sector has turned from negative to positive, essentially filling up the gap created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last year, the cargo throughput in China's ports registered a rapid increase, with a year-on-year growth of 4.3 percent. In particular, the express delivery industry bucked the trend, with a total of 83.36 billion parcels handled, up 31.2 percent year-on year.

By the end of 2020, China had a total of 38,000 kilometers of high-speed railways, and 161,000 km of expressways. The country had 2,592 berths of 10,000-ton-class or above, 72 more than that of 2019. There were 240 certified civil airports throughout the country.

China's rural roads network expanded. By the end of 2020, the country had a total of 4.38 million km of rural roads, accounting for 84.3 percent of the total length of roads in China.

The structure of China's transport sector continued to optimize. Total rail passenger transport reached 2.20 billion people, while the civil aviation industry handled 418 million passenger trips in 2020. The passenger volume of urban rail transit stood at 17.59 billion people, accounting for 20.2 percent of all urban transport passengers, up 1.5 percentage points from 2019.

The structure of cargo transport also experienced improvement. Last year, rail cargo throughput reached 4.55 billion tons, accounting for 9.8 percent of the total and up 0.3 percentage points from 2019. Waterway cargo throughput came in at 7.62 billion tons, accounting for 16.4 percent of the total and up 0.2 percentage points from 2019.

In 2020, container handling volume of rail-waterway transport at China's ports amounted to 6.87 million twenty-foot equivalent units, up 29.6 percent from a year ago, according to the ministry.