A town consisting of about 30 colleges and vocational schools for students from the Korean Peninsula is to be built in the Oriental University City in Langfang, 40-kilometres (about 25 miles) southeast of Beijing.

With an investment of around US$1 billion, the town for the Koreans will cover 3.3 million square metres (around 3.9 million square yards) of land halfway between Beijing and Tianjin.

"The town aims to introduce advanced educational concepts and systems like Internet-based multimedia and online teaching models into China to promote culture and education exchanges between China and the Republic of Korea (ROK)," Lee Young-soo, president and chief executive officer of Tagalder Inc told the media.

The town also welcomes students from the Democratic Republic of Korea as well as China.

Lee pledged to build the town, the largest one of its kind under construction in the university city, into one of the world's first-class, education bases adopting advanced teaching facilities by 2012 when it is completed.

Lee was confident that the town will become one of the world's best IT parks using the world's latest Internet-based teaching information technologies.

To provide better services for students and staff living in the town, schoolhouses, shops,and apartments will be built along with modern sports and entertainment facilities, Lee said.

Lee hopes the town, that will feature commercial districts and amazing parks, will be an ideal place for its future residents.

It is thought that some 400,000 Koreans from both the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the Republic Of Korea are living in the Beijing-Tianjin area today.

The Oriental University City, the largest of its kind in China, was designed by the Beijing Foreign Enterprise Service Corporation in the Langfang Economic & Technology Development Zone since 1999. It has a planned investment of 12 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion) from enterprises and from government preferential policies for land-use and tax reduction.

The city, with more than 1,330 hectares (about 3,285 acres) of land still under construction , is expected to be built as a special education zone to optimize North China's educational resources and to enable it to share regional resources with neighbouring areas, such as Beijing and Tianjin. This is fundamentally to meet the needs of China's currently growing number of higher education establishments.

To date, more than 15,000 students and staff from Beijing's 15 universities have lived and studied in the city, according to local officials.

(China Daily March 11, 2002)