Facing increasing pressure of limited or restricted resources, Beijing plans to slow down its population growth in order to make the Chinese capital more life friendly, according to a city plan for 2004-2020.

The long-term plan, a fundamental document to guide the city's development in the next 16 years, says Beijing will try to keep its population within 18 million by 2020, which means the city's annual population growth rate will be lowered to 1.4 percent from the current 2.5 percent.

Presently, there are about 14.5 million people living in Beijing, 3 million of whom are outsiders without permanent residence registration.

Experts have long appealed for the city's population to be kept in line with the capacity of its resources, involving land, energy and water.

For instance, Beijing is severely lacking in water. Its annual water availability per capita is less than 300 cubic meters, some 1/32nd of international levels.

Some experts estimate that the city's water resources can only bear at most 17 to 18 million people.

Beijing has undergone rapid expansion that has far exceeded expectation in the past decade.

According to the old city plan made in 1993, the city predicted 14 million residents by 2040. However, the target figure was reached last year, 37 years earlier than expected.

And the number of vehicles in the city exceeded 2.2 million by June this year, far higher than the 1.3 million set for 2010 in the old plan.

As a result, Beijing had to revise city plans early this year, and introduce the concept of "building a society suitable for living" for the first time.

Besides slowing down the population growth figures, the revised plan, made public last Saturday, stresses the role of "satellite towns" to alleviate pressure on central areas. The city will build 11 "new towns" on its outskirts, among which, three towns - Tongzhou, Shunyi and Yizhuang in eastern Beijing - are the key places to where a large portion of the population and industries will move.

The multi-center city layout is a solution to the current arrangement of "concentric circles with one center" which is blamed as the root cause of endless traffic jams in Beijing.

The downtown area, covering only 12 percent of the city's area, now takes on nearly a fourth of the total traffic flow because 400-plus government organs and institutions are crowded into it.

Public transit construction is another key point of the new plan.

(Xinhua News Agency November 9, 2004)