Recently, the Ministry of Land and Resources has issued the Adjustment Plan for the Outline of National Overall Planning on Land Use (2006-2020) (the "Plan").
The Plan makes adjustments and improvements of the Outline of National Overall Planning on Land Use (2006-2020). Upon adjustment, by 2020, the minimum area of arable land in China will be 1.865 billion mu; the area of protected basic farmland will be 1.546 billion mu; and the total scale of construction land will be limited to a maximum of 40.7193 million hectare (610.79 million mu). Therefore, the Plan requires the implementation of total area control and area minimization management for construction land, by strictly controlling the increment, making good use of the dormant land, optimizing the structure and improving the efficiency. Specifically, when adjusting the structure and layout of construction land, the government shall, on the basis of the evaluation of the resource and environmental carrying capacity, direct people and industries to cluster in areas with higher resource and environmental carrying capacity; and advance the new urbanization, strictly control the scale of land use in megacities, and reasonably arrange the land use in big, medium and small cities.