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The Chinese capital has decided to invest seven billion yuan (US$843 million) in building new museums and renovating existing ones, according to the Beijing Daily.
Every district and county of Beijing will have one or two museums by 2008 when the city hosts the Olympic Games, the newspaper said.
In recent years, the municipal government improved regulations on museum management, and budgeted more money for building museums. The 1.2-billion-yuan (US$145 million) new home of the Capital Museum would be completed and open to the public in 2005. More museums were under construction, most on original cultural relics sites, the newspaper said.
The number of museums in Beijing had increased from 96 in 1996 to 118 at the end of 2002, accounting for 5.7 percent of China's total museums.
The newspaper said there was one museum for every 10,000 Beijing residents, a ratio equal to that in moderately developed countries, and remarkably higher than the national ratio of one museum to every 620,000 people.
(Xinhua News Agency March 26, 2003)
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