People affect lake
Shan said some of the 40 villages surrounded by water in Baiyangdian - with some 90,000 people - will be completely or partly relocated in an orderly manner as "their living and production activities have posed great challenges to the lake".
"Environmental monitoring shows that the water quality of Baiyangdian Lake is currently affected by four key pollutants - chemical oxygen demand, ammonia nitrogen, total phosphorus and total nitrogen," Shan said. "More than 50 percent of the chemical oxygen demand and total phosphorus come from domestic wastewater and trash from villages located in and around the lake and from fish farming activities in these villages."
It's beyond the carrying capacity of the lake environment to have so many villages and such a large population, he said, adding that the ecology of the lake cannot be restored without the relocations.
Qu Jiuhui, the academician, said some of the work of basin reclamation has been started. Under the government's plan, priority will be given to the Fuhe and Xiaoyi rivers, as well as to the northern part of the lake near the current boundary of Xiongan.
According to the plan, Baiyangdian's comprehensive environmental treatment and ecological restoration will be finished by 2035. By then, the water level of the lake will stand at 6.5 to 7 meters and water quality will reach Grade III to IV, the third and fourth lowest of the country's five-tier water quality grading system.
Green land and clean water will account for 70 percent of Xiongan, according to the recently published overall plan (2018-35) for Xiongan New Area.
China announced the creation of Xiongan New Area in April 2017. Located about 100 kilometers southwest of Beijing, the new area is to take on Beijing's noncapital functions.
'Profound significance'
President Xi, who is also general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, has stressed the importance of Xiongan on various high-profile occasions.
In his report delivered at the CPC's 19th National Congress in October 2017, Xi said: "We will develop forward-looking plans and adopt high standards for building the Xiongan New Area."
The master plan document approved by China's central authorities in April referred to the new area as "a strategic decision with profound historic significance". It follows other significant developments, such as the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and Shanghai Pudong New Area.
It's "a strategy that will have lasting importance for the millennium to come", the plan said.
