Dozens of bulldozers are flattening hills on the north bank of the Yellow River in Lanzhou City. In three to four years, the area is planned to turn into a bustling downtown.

The ambitious land-transformation project has been dubbed as a real-life version of the Chinese legend "Foolish Man Moving Mountains," which is equivalent to the Western term of "where there's a will, there's a way."

The 10-square-km land with about 1,000 low hills has been designated as an extended city area of Lanzhou, capital of northwest China's Gansu Province.

The urban expansion is expected to solve the land use bottleneck for the city narrowed by mountains from the north and the south and with the Yellow River traversing through the middle.

Li Changjiang, deputy director of the Lanzhou Land Resources Bureau, said that restricted by geological conditions, the city has the least land reserve to support its urbanization among all provincial capital cities in China.

However, the city predicts its population will increase from 3.6 million to 5 million in the next few years as more farmers quit farmlands to work in the town.

The urban part of Lanzhou has mainly flourished on the southern bank of the river, where no more land reserve can be used for real estate development.

"The city can not turn to its outlying farming areas for land development, as the central government has made strict orders to safeguard arable land reserve only for farming purposes in order to ensure adequate grain supply," said Li.

In efforts to help Lanzhou and other cities with similar problems to seek development, the central authorities have designated the first group of 11 cities to pilot a comprehensive waste land exploration program. This is aimed to strike a balance between guaranteeing land for urbanization development and the protection of arable land.

Among them, there are the revolutionary base of Yan'an in Shaanxi Province and Lishui, a hilly city in eastern Zhejiang Province.

Under the program, the Ministry of Land Resources has allowed local authorities to transform waste land for urbanization.

It has also stipulated that the newly reclaimed urban part for each of the cities can not exceed 10 square km in the next five years.

Before the Lanzhou New Area construction was kicked off earlier this month, it was Baidaoping Village. Little greenery can be spotted on the low-yielding loess land.

Most of 1,800 villagers lived on growing vegetables on small patches of land they reclaimed on the upland.

As the place is urbanized, it has been eyed as the most sought-after housing areas for Lanzhou citizens, which have been troubled by soaring housing prices resulted by the land crisis.

The city's planning department has pictured the new city area as a ladder-type town suitable for its upland landscape.

The large-scale land development project has attracted private developers including the Nanjing-based China Pacific Construction Group and the Guangdong Country Garden Holdings Group.

Yan Jiehe, chairman of the China Pacific Construction Group, said the company planned to spend six months leveling the hills before consolidating it for urban land development.

The company has signed an agreement with the Lanzhou municipal government to invest 20 billion yuan (3 billion US dollars) for the development project.

Under the agreement, the government will pay back the fund with an additional 9 percent profit for the company after the land auction.