Beijing: Beijing will take aggressive measures to cure the "big city disease", making sure the city's population does not cross 21.8 million by the end of this year, the mayor of the Chinese capital said.
Wang Anshun was speaking at a meeting analysing Beijing's economic situation in the first half of this year. The city is facing severe resource and environment pressures caused by fast growing population.
By the end of 2014, the permanent resident population of Beijing was 21.5 million, among which 12.8 million living in the six urban districts. Beijing is plagued by water resource shortages, air pollution, traffic congestion and other problems caused by insufficient environment capacity.
According to the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region's Coordinated Development Planning Outline, the population of Beijing should be within 23 million by 2020 and the ratio of urban population should be 15 percent lower than that of 2014.
The Chinese government has already announced plans to build a satellite city adjacent to Beijing to limit the city's population to 23 million, an official announcement here said on July 12.
"Beijing will take a series of function dispersal measures to prevent new population gathering, making sure the permanent resident population is within 21.8 million by the end of this year. The municipal government and all the districts and counties of Beijing have signed the letter of responsibility to fulfil the goal," Wang said.
The mayor also said that Beijing will take innovative measures to deal with overpopulation, traffic congestion, and environment pollution, so as to make breakthroughs in curing the "big city disease".
