Plan will ease infrastructure pressure in Beijing
The Tongzhou district in southeast Beijing will become the capital's sub-administrative center under a national strategy to coordinate the development of Beijing, Tianjin and North China's Hebei Province, officials said over the weekend.
The city will accelerate the shift of its non-capital functions to Tongzhou and other nearby places, and progress should be evident by 2017, according to the Beijing municipal committee of the Communist Party of China.
The news was taken as confirmation of widespread rumors that such a move was impending to ease pressure on Beijing's infrastructure.
"Tongzhou's position as Beijing's sub-administrative center was decided a long time ago in the city's plan, and now it is confirmed," Zhang Wuming, a director of the regional strategy research center at the Beijing-based FangTang Think Tank, told the Global Times on Sunday.
The Beijing municipal government itself will move to Tongzhou, and it is expected that the process will be finished before 2017, Shanghai-based financial newspaper the 21st Century Business Herald reported on Sunday, citing an unidentified Beijing government source.
Other municipal institutions such as service centers, industry associations, research institutes and some publication agencies will also move to Tongzhou, the source said.
The Beijing government has made many efforts in recent years to ease overcrowding in the capital, but little progress has been made, Zhang said, adding that an administrative decision will be more effective.
The excessive concentration of administration departments is a cause of Beijing's "urban disease", and moving the municipal government to Tongzhou is part of the devolution of Beijing's non-capital functions. This process is the core of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region coordinated development plan, according to Zhang.
But easing congestion in Beijing's urban area requires that relocated residents not only work in Tongzhou but also live there, Zhang said. Otherwise, traffic congestion may worsen because of their daily commutes.
If those workers actually move to Tongzhou, as many as 1 million people can be relocated from the city center, but such a move cannot be achieved by administrative order alone, Zhang said.
Rumors of the impending move lifted the district's property market in the first half of this year. The average home price in Tongzhou jumped 30 percent year-on-year to 28,000 yuan ($4,510) per square meter during the first six months, and new home sales in June surged 87 percent month-on-month on a unit basis, the 21st Century Business Herald said.
But Tongzhou is still short of public resources, such as hospitals and schools, and after the municipal government's move to the district, the shortages will become an urgent issue, Zhang said.
