In the new Beijing

My generation​ has seen four paramount leaders: Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and now Xi Jinping. Deng, the only one not to serve as general secretary of the Party Central Committee, initiated the market economy reforms of the 1980s and established Shenzhen’s Special Economic Zone. Jiang accelerated China’s economic integration into the global economy and established Shanghai’s Pudong New District. As for Xi, while his reign is not yet over, it’s clear he wants his achievements to overshadow those of his predecessors. In April 2017, reporting on the Central Committee’s decision to build Xiong’an New Area, 12o kilometres south of Beijing, the Xinhua news agency called it the ‘one thousand year big plan’. Designed to accommodate five million people and to act as Beijing’s twin, Xiong’an is a city created from nothing. The name, too, is a new construction, combining characters from two local counties. Xiong (雄) means majestic, male, heroic; An (安) means stability, safety, wellbeing. With such an auspicious name, it’s no wonder the city will live for a thousand years.

Xiong’an is being built on a stretch of nondescript agricultural land about three times the size of New York City. The site is next to a large freshwater lake whose water quality hovered for many years at ‘worse than Category V’ (water deemed Category III or below shouldn’t be drunk). Near the lake, you can smell fish and chemicals. Hydrologists tried to argue against the decision to build a city without an adequate clean water supply, on a flood plain that acts as a sewage sump. Their concerns were dismissed.

What is the purpose of Xiong’an? And what will it be like to live in the ‘city of the future’, as CCP media refer to it? These are questions that inhabitants of Beijing ask themselves. For some, knowledge about life in Xiong’an has become a matter of immediate personal interest. A friend of mine faces a difficult choice. Both she and her husband are mid-career executives, with good salaries and a lifestyle they don’t complain about. Ever since the construction of Xiong’an began, there have been rumours that the state-owned company she works for is on the list to be moved to the new city, in accordance with the Party Central Committee’s non-negotiable strategy. In 2023, after Xi paid an official visit to Xiong’an, it became clear that relocation was imminent.

‘If people can be packaged and transported, installed in a different place, plugged in and used, just like computers and office equipment, that would be simple,’ my friend told me. ‘But what about my daughter? What about my parents?’ Her daughter is due to take the high school entrance exam next year. Beijing has the best schools in the country: leaving now would be a problem. The solution presented by the company’s ‘mobilisation and relocation office’ was simple: ‘Follow us, or stay behind on your own.’ For my friend, continuing to live in Beijing would mean a two-hour commute each way, or leaving her job, which she can’t afford to do. At the end of last year, to help her decide, I went with her to see the city of the future.

Five years ago, the only part of Xiong’an open to the public was the ‘Citizen Service Centre’. Attracted by inspiring videos of the city, visitors drove down in great numbers. Volunteers met them in the massive car park and took them on shuttle buses to a miniature version of a city zone that looked like one of the most prosperous commercial districts in Beijing. There were pedestrian pathways and attractive little gardens between the high-end housing blocks. The office buildings displayed the signs of the well-known enterprises and government departments that were due to move in. There were restaurants, a McDonald’s, a Starbucks, an unmanned convenience store and a semi-automated rubbish bin. Volunteers in green jackets showed the tourists how to use it: put an empty water bottle into a hole, wait a second, and a small souvenir, a key ring or a wristband, pops out of a slot as your reward for protecting the environment. The centre isn’t big and the tour didn’t last long. Visitors, returning by shuttle bus to their cars, felt they were leaving a new sort of theme park – a political one. When you asked the volunteers where you could see the real Xiong’an city, you got the same reply: ‘It’s under construction.’ By the end of last year, seven years after construction began, the Citizen Service Centre was retired from its showcase role. It is now just one small part of a large, growing city. This time, there would be much for us to see.

We set off at 7 a.m., when the traffic on Beijing’s Second Ring Road was moving about as fast as the contents of a blocked intestine. Once we were out of the city, the road opened up. Ahead lay the brand new Jing-Xiong highway: three lanes in each direction, transparent isolation walls on both sides, evenly spaced streetlights illuminating the fresh tarmac. It felt like a science fiction movie: there were almost no other vehicles on the road. ‘Look, if we keep going at this speed, it wouldn’t be impossible to go there and back in a day,’ I said to encourage my friend. She didn’t reply.

We arrived in Xiong’an an hour and a half later. The roads are new, with no signage at some of the intersections, and we soon got lost. When the GPS reminded us to ‘Please keep left and enter the tunnel,’ my friend obeyed. ‘Wrong turn! Keep left, not turn left.’ Fortunately, the roads were empty. There was a gap in the central barrier, so I told her to turn around. ‘No, no. I have to find a U-turn sign.’ ‘I didn’t see a camera,’ I said. ‘But here,’ she replied, ‘any violation of traffic rules is monitored in real time. Skynet’ – she pointed a finger upwards – ‘has all the information about this car, and you and me, in its database.’ Skynet, launched in 2015, has become the world’s largest video surveillance network and by 2022 more than 500 million cameras were monitoring all public urban areas. There are no blind spots.

My friend indicated a cluster of apartment buildings in the distance and said: ‘That could be where I live.’ From a distance, the buildings looked as neat as the models on an architects’ table. As we got closer, we could see that some were already occupied. ‘The returnees,’ she said. ‘They are the first batch of residents moving in.’ Returnees are the local villagers whose houses were demolished. In exchange, they have been given apartments, the size of which depends on how much they lost. Property in Xiong’an can’t be bought and sold. If Xiong’an were like other cities, prices would have already skyrocketed but the Party Central Committee wanted to stamp out speculation. They capped property prices, so the difference in cost between apartments is small. But my friend insisted that this generosity wasn’t intended to last. Soon enough, the government would end its policy of restricting prices, and ‘the value of the good apartments will go up. That’s one of the pros of moving here – you can buy an apartment at lower than market price, and it may turn into a small fortune.’ We drove through the Rongxi section of the city, which occupies the third county that Xiong’an claimed. More than 37,000 people have moved back here. Considering the stagnation of the property market in the rest of the country, the situation in Xiong’an doesn’t seem too depressing.

Construction on the scale we saw is exceptional even by Chinese standards. Expenditure on 383 key projects in Xiong’an has exceeded 774 billion yuan (£86 billion). Yet the 4251 buildings now completed or under construction cover just a fraction of the planned area. All the buildings we saw were in the ‘start-up zone’. Most, like the massive Xiong’an Xuanwu Hospital, are still little used. In Beijing, Xuanwu is a class A tertiary hospital – one of the best. The Xiong’an version looked bigger. Although it has been open since 2023 we saw no patients and no cars, in stark contrast to its Beijing counterpart, where there’s nowhere to park and patients wait for weeks to see a doctor.

By noon we were both hungry. On Baidu Maps, I clicked ‘search for nearby restaurants’, and small red pins clustered around the Business Service Centre, making our choice simple. The main building was impressive; noticeboards announced that it had won the Lu Ban Award last year. The biennial Lu Ban Award is the highest architectural honour in China, named after the founder of civil engineering and carpentry. (School textbooks claim that Lu Ban, who lived from 507-444 bce, was inspired to invent the saw after cutting his finger on a blade of grass.) Other buildings in Xiong’an have also won the award, including the central railway station and the Citizen Service Centre, a sure sign of the Party Central Committee’s determination to make this a capital for the coming millennium.

There were slogans at the entrance to the business centre: ‘Loyally defend the two establishments and resolutely implement the two safeguards.’ The red characters were displayed on a yellow background, the orthodox colours of party activities. The ‘two establishments’ refer to ‘establishing Comrade Xi Jinping’s core position in the Party Central Committee and hence the core position in the entire party, and establishing the leading position of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’. The ‘two safeguards’ are ‘safeguarding General Secretary Xi Jinping’s core position in the Party Central Committee and his central position in the party and safeguarding the authority and centralised and unified leadership of the Party Central Committee, with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core’.

A little way to the south was a sunken square, most of which was taken up by an artificial pond. The water was stagnant and shallow but there were fish swimming around (apparently they were introduced through the pipes when the pond was filled). Three women working in sales were chatting at the water’s edge. One complained that she didn’t know how long she could stay in her job. She was only getting her basic salary, with no sales bonus: ‘There are more sellers than buyers all day long.’ The second girl said their boss was promising that, as more people moved in, things would improve. ‘He’s been saying that for three years,’ the third pointed out. A young man was sitting under a mushroom-shaped yellow parasol, smoking and talking angrily on his phone: ‘I’ve fixed two cameras! You need a lifting platform tomorrow? Where on earth can I get that?’

In the food court, there were twenty or so diners outside the stalls and rows on rows of empty seats. Hunan rice bowls, Guizhou clay pots, Sichuan hotpots, Shaanxi Liangpi cold noodles, Old Beijing fried soybean-paste noodles: the outlets were serving dishes from all over China, but we couldn’t find anything local. We sat down at a table near a flat-screen TV playing the Xiong’an promotional video on loop, interspersed with ads for apartments to rent. China Central Television had made a programme for the 1 October National Day. ‘Let’s see what the Xiong’an newcomers have to say,’ the reporter began. ‘First, let’s hear from primary school students.’ A young boy came on: ‘I’m participating in the choir to celebrate the National Day because I want to win honour for my class, and I want to celebrate the birthday of our motherland. So I wish our motherland a happy birthday!’ On TV, the sky is azure, the roads are straight, the buildings are tall, the trees are green and everyone is smiling.

Xi explained the need for the new city: ‘Beijing’s population will reach capacity within one or two years. The capital is first and foremost a political centre, and shouldn’t be a hotchpotch. We can’t have “factories in the alleys” or a “street stall economy”. Xiong’an New Area was created to relieve Beijing of its non-capital functions, not to simply build a new district or a new city.’ The Party Central Committee describes Xiong’an as a vehicle for decentralisation, though that’s a poor translation of the word in Chinese, which combines the characters 疏 (shu) and 解 (jie): 疏 means to dredge and guide, 解 to ease and mediate. The implication is that Beijing is too much of an urban tangle to handle all its political, economic and cultural functions, and suffers from incurable problems. Xi wants to ‘build a city of the future without urban diseases’. Whether there might be other, cheaper ways of fixing Beijing, without building a whole new city, is a question no one need worry about.

The Xiong’an New Area Computing Centre

The architects of Xiong’an believe that information technology will be part of the solution. As the buildings continue to go up and the city expands, another Xiong’an is being built in the cloud. For every building in the physical Xiong’an, a digital twin is simultaneously created. Traffic patterns, water and electricity consumption, phone and internet usage, as well as citizens’ daily movements, are collected and monitored. Cameras equipped with facial recognition technology are constantly scanning passersby to help provide services. Every financial transaction made, every unit of electricity and litre of water consumed, every traffic infringement or illegal bit of parking, every blown-down tree, every overflowing rubbish bin or broken streetlamp is recorded and compiled in a central data facility: Xiong’an New Area’s Computing Centre.

The complex that houses the facility is a white rectangular construction with a large arch in the middle, under which a walkway divides a pool of water. The building has four floors, three of them above the ground. At 8.30 p.m. every evening the building is lit up, making it look like a portal to a different world. The arch and its reflection in the water look like an eye. People call it the ‘Eye of Xiong’an’.

The department my friend works in has business dealings with the computing centre, so she had made an appointment to meet an acquaintance, Li. In the hall, under a curved roof dotted with lights to make it look like the night sky, Li pointed out technicians tapping away on their keyboards and a curved screen across one wall displaying the status of the city’s electrical, gas and water infrastructure, connecting residential, commercial and government buildings in a tree-like structure. Numbers appeared next to each residential building. ‘That’s the water and electricity consumption of each household,’ Li said. ‘Our computing centre will have 532 cabinets in Stage One, which can provide 90,000 CPU cores with 42 PB storage. The final stage is planned to have 3600 cabinets and …’ The numbers kept rolling out, as if from a well-functioning machine.

‘Hey, Li,’ my friend interrupted. ‘How long have you lived here? How is it different from where you were living in Beijing?’

‘I started out at the Citizen Centre before I began working here full-time,’ he said. ‘The biggest difference? I have a job with bianzhi’ – a formal position in the government employment system, which brings various benefits. ‘I am certified with Xiong Talent Card C.’ He smiled happily. A permanent job with bianzhi is hard to obtain in any of China’s established cities, where unemployment rates among the young are so high that the statistics bureaus no longer release figures. As a C-Card holder, Li is eligible to buy an apartment. It won’t be cheap, but he can afford it thanks to a loan from the national housing fund, which he could only have dreamed about when he was in Beijing.

‘If you are a C-Card holder, who are the A-Card holders?’

‘Important people. Winners of the Nobel Prize, the Fields Medal, the Turing Award and the National Highest Science and Technology Award; academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Engineering and so on.’

‘Are they really going to come and live here?’

‘That I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But since Xiong’an New Area introduced “sixteen policy measures” to attract top talents we have issued more than twelve thousand Xiong’an talent cards so far.’ He used the word ‘we’. He is a Xiong’an citizen now.

‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

‘She’s in Beijing.’

‘She doesn’t want to come here?’

‘Her workplace is in Beijing. She couldn’t find anything better in Xiong’an.’ This is a common story: an increasing number of couples can no longer live and work in the same city. As several million people relocate to Xiong’an, a new society is forming. Tens of thousands of unmarried young men and women will be looking for partners, just as they did in Beijing. The Youth League Committee, the Work Union and the Women’s Federation will organise collective blind dates. At some point, couples will sign marriage contracts and, along with their children, will become the future citizens the city is being built for.

‘Is it easy living here?’ my friend asked, to change the subject.

‘Oh yes,’ Li said. ‘Whatever Beijing has is going to be available here too: shopping malls, entertainment facilities, parks. The parks here are even more beautiful, and there are fewer people. When we explain how the city works to visitors, we always tell them this story. An eighty-year-old lady who lived alone was not in good health. One day, the water meter, electricity meter and gas meter in the old lady’s apartment hadn’t moved for 24 hours. The computing platform sent an alert to our staff, who contacted the local grid worker to knock on her door. The grid worker found the old lady couldn’t get out of bed due to a sudden illness and immediately called medical staff. They saved her life.’

It was my turn to feel uneasy. ‘Everything in your life here is monitored?’ Since the company my friend works for is in this field, she tried to reassure me. Things are really no different in Beijing. She told me my face had been scanned many times today, from the moment I stepped out of my apartment in Beijing. ‘Here in Xiong’an, Skynet will only be more advanced and have a wider coverage since it is built with the latest technology. The second the system scanned our faces, they recognised our gender, the clothes we wear and even our age. It can match your face with your ID number in a split second. And with your ID number they can find out everything about you.’

For the purposes of data monitoring, the city is divided into sections, called ‘grids’. Grid workers, employed at the lowest level of the civil service system, are required to know the households in the grids under their jurisdiction: they need to know which apartments have elderly people, which have tenants, which have pregnant women, which have family members overseas, which are in the middle of lawsuits, which have bad relationships between mother and daughter-in-law, which have frequent quarrels, which are rich, which are poor. Even an elderly woman who doesn’t know how to use a smartphone and doesn’t watch TV is constantly feeding data into this network by turning lights on and off, using the toilet or turning on the stove. ‘With this eye of wisdom,’ Li gestured to the building around us, ‘everyone will be looked after.’

Under the gaze of the ‘Eye of Xiong’an’ we walked outside. It was quiet, and a handful of visitors were posing to take pictures in front of the building. Our leather shoes made just the right sound on the light grey tiles: soft, nothing harsh. A gentle breeze created regular fine ripples on the water either side of the walkway. We left the water feature behind and stepped out onto a flat road stretching ahead in an unbroken straight line. In the distance tall cranes were slowly turning. We had an unobstructed view to the barren horizon, broken only by a few high-rise commercial buildings. For a moment it really felt as though we were walking into the city of the future.