About 400,000 people are expected to move to Beijing's suburban Tongzhou district after city authorities move their offices there by the end of 2017, as part of the capital's plan to create several new towns to ease downtown overcrowding. However, the goal of a less-crowded Beijing is not likely to be achieved in the short-term, said experts.
Beijing's municipal government, top legislature, top political advisory body and Party committee will move to Tongzhou in eastern Beijing next year, Li Shixiang, the capital's vice mayor announced on Monday.
Although up to 400,000 people are expected to move from downtown Beijing to Tongzhou, the number accounts for only a small proportion of the 21.7 million Beijing residents. Many of them will merely work in these new towns and commute from the crowded residential areas they live in, which will still cause congestion, said experts.
The population of Beijing's six downtown districts was 12.76 million in 2014, 59 percent of the city's total population, the Xinhua News Agency reported in December.
Though this problem will take years to solve and the government will run into many difficulties in implementing these policies, the city is on the right track to address its congestion problem, Niu Fengrui, director of the Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.
Unobstructed Beijing?
Beijing has relocated labor-intensive industries to neighboring provinces to slow the city's population growth rate and has built up its suburban and rural areas to encourage people to live outside the inner city, said Niu.
It will take at least another decade to see whether the new measures will be successful, said Yin Zhi, dean of the Beijing Tsinghua Urban Planning and Design Institute of Tsinghua University.
Moreover, the new towns need to be built to a higher standard than the central urban area in every aspect, having better infrastructure, better public services and better environment to encourage people to move there and stay there, said Yin.
A total of seven subway lines will be built to better connect central Beijing and Tongzhou, including the existing two lines, together with a highway directly connecting the suburb with the city center, said Wang.
Well-known schools including Beijing No.4 High School and the High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China will "completely" move to Tongzhou, as well as several major hospitals, Wang Yunfeng, former Party chief of Tongzhou said during the annual meeting of National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference on Monday.
The new infrastructure needs to be green and smart, featuring leading technology, which will require policy and financial support, said Yin.
Apart from the present investment of 30 billion yuan, over 100 billion yuan will be invested to Tongzhou to speed up its establishment as an administrative center, Wang added.
Not a sleeping town
Apart from Tongzhou, Beijing also plans to build new towns in its suburban Daxing, Shunyi and Changping districts to help relieve overcrowding, news site cnr.com reported Tuesday.
Plans to turn Changping into an education center, rural Huairou district into a cultural center and Daxing into a high-end industry center should also be a priority, said Li.
Unlike satellite cities, new towns are entirely self-contained, and are designed to satisfy people's working and living needs. Satellite cities, in which people live but do not work, are known as "sleeping towns," and traffic congestion still exists between them and the inner city due to the separation of work and life, said Yin.
Though those new towns are unlikely to address congestion in Beijing in the short term, downtown Beijing and the new towns will share the functions which are currently concentrated in downtown areas, said Sheng Guangyao, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Conflicts are inevitable in urbanization, including between different regions and between groups looking for a greater share of development, said Niu. He added that though the capital's planning is on the right track, these kinds of conflicts might derail the plan when it is being implemented.
The planning of those new towns began as early as 2000, but progress has been slow due to difficulties in human resources, land planning, industry migration and public services, said Yin.
