Beijing 'enlarges space' for smart businesses in new area

Beijing will continue to deepen the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region to help neighboring counties further absorb its non-capital functions, a senior official knowledgable about the city's plans said on Thursday.

To speed up the development of Xiong'an New Area in Hebei province and Beijing's subcenter located in Tongzhou district as "two wings" of Beijing, the capital integrated its development into overall national planning, said Li Wenhong, a senior official of the municipal commission of development and reform, at a news conference on Thursday in Beijing.

In 2014, the city formulated and implemented a list of prohibitions and restrictions on new industries in Beijing, which also served as China's first catalog of bans to cure "big city diseases".

According to Li, as of the end of last year, Beijing had registered 23,400 transactions that would not be handled. "It enlarges the space to build high-end technological industries that go along with the capital's functions," she said.

Beijing has phased out more than 2,800 manufacturing and polluting enterprises since 2014, helping relocate or upgrade more than 980 regional wholesale and logistics centers, Li said.

In addition, the capital guided the relocation of desirable industries — such as those in the intelligent manufacturing and software information technology service sector — to three neighboring counties in Hebei province.

"We will accelerate the construction of a modern metropolitan area, breaking new ground in how to formulate a world-class city cluster, with the capital city as the core," she said.