Lots of people even have the private cars needed to drive an hour or two to the mountains near Beijing and some other urban centers.

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Hengshui is located in Hebei, a neighboring province to Beijing, and has an urban population of 460, 240, and a total population of 4, 340, 373.

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When an American-style drive-in movie theatre opened in the north-eastern outskirts of Beijing in 1998, it was tempting to imagine young urban Chinese using their new cars as a tool for dating.

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Some might opt to avoid very expensive cities, such as Beijing or Shanghai, for up-and-coming smaller urban centers such as Chengdu, the provincial capital of agriculturally fecund Sichuan province.

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But the urban economy relies on migrant labour, and some cities have been much more adroit than Beijing in providing schools.

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The Beijing Design Forum brought those festival cities together to help form a new network of cities using design to make urban agglomerations more livable.

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