Phoenix TV:

Urban development would involve future development opportunities and plans. General Secretary Xi Jinping underlined during an inspection tour in Shanghai that the city must strive to improve its urban functions and increase its core competitiveness. Shanghai's 14th Five-Year Plan puts special emphasis on strengthening the construction of five new towns, including Jiading, Huangpu, and Songjiang, to create opportunities and poles of growth for Shanghai's future development. What plans will Shanghai put in place to create its own strategic poles of growth through the construction of these new towns? Thank you.

Chen Yin:

After years of construction, Shanghai has become a metropolitan city with a permanent population of nearly 25 million. We also see that most of the people live in downtown, where the population density reaches 20,000 people per square kilometer, much denser than that of the 13,000 people per square kilometer in Tokyo and New York. That's why we need to make the urban layout more practical and promote the continuous optimization of urban construction in the future. In the 14th Five-Year Plan, the municipal CPC committee and government of Shanghai have proposed to build five new towns, including Jiading, Qingpu, Fengxian, Songjiang, and Nanhui. These will act as key regions in the city's future construction, break the bottleneck of land resources, support the upgrade of urban functions, and create strategic spaces and important poles of growth for future development. Construction of the five new towns aims to build them into independent and comprehensive connecting towns, which is a completely different concept from that of pendulum satellite towns. They cannot be simply regarded as sub-centers of the city. They must be part of a world-class town cluster in the Yangtze River Delta. Therefore, we must enhance the complementary functionality and interactivity between the new towns and downtown Shanghai, between the five new towns, as well as between the new towns and the 40 preexisting cities in the Yangtze River Delta.

We have proposed building the five new towns into a future city, with a high-quality life and as an important pole of growth for Shanghai's economic development. As such, it will become an area for urban construction innovation, a demonstration area for urban digital transformation, and a strategic support point serving the Yangtze River Delta. We will focus on six tasks during the process.

First, by integrating industries and new towns. We will coordinate so that the new towns work alongside their surrounding industrial bases during the construction, promote functionally qualified industrial projects to move to the new towns, and encourage the new towns to develop high-end industrial clusters.

Second, by being well-functioned. We will speed up efforts to improve basic public services such as medical care, education, culture, and the ecological environment, and focus on developing distinctive functions. The CPC Shanghai municipal committee and the government of Shanghai have planned some demonstrative schools, grade-3 medical institutes, and public culture construction and operation in all five new towns so that residents can have access to better public services.

Third, by keeping a jobs-housing balance. The needs of those living in the new area must be fully considered in the urban spatial layout of the new towns' planning, with residential land meeting the needs of the population size. Commercial housing and leased housings will co-exist on the residential land.

Fourth, by being ecologically viable. We will create a green, low-carbon, and beautiful ecological environment, and strive to increase vegetation coverage and improve the water and air quality in the new towns. To some extent, the ecological environment in the new towns will be more advantageous and attractive than that of downtown Shanghai.

Fifth, by having convenient transportation. We will focus on building a public transportation hub in each new town to connect the outside and improve the construction of comprehensive transportation systems inside the new towns.

Sixth, by keeping efficient governance. We should not only build the new towns well but also manage and operate them properly. We have proposed transforming the citizens' happiness list into a list of governance responsibilities. We will give priority to major livelihood projects that will benefit a wide range of people and provide them with a strong sense of gain as well as continue to improve urban governance on a digital level and focus on strengthening the systematic resilience of the towns against risks. Thank you.

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