A growing number of cities in south China's Guangdong Province, one of the country's economic powerhouses, are expanding to prepare for faster economic growth in the future.
Ten of Guangdong's 33 county-level cities have become urban districts of other larger cities in the past couple of years, said a local official in charge of construction.
In the latest move, Huiyang City was turned into a district under its jurisdiction of Huizhou city to facilitate the quick construction of a petrochemical project by Royal-Dutch/Shell Group and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), the official said.
Other larger cities such as Shantou, provincial capital Guangzhou, Jiangmen, and Foshan have taken similar actions to speed up economic development.
Inclusion of Nansha into Guangzhou's southward urban expansion plan will double the area of Guangzhou's present urban districts and turn Guangzhou into an even larger city which sits on both an inland river and the coast and has a population of over 10 million.
(People's Daily March 21, 2003)
