Five retired farmers are on the regular bus.
They have the tanned faces of those who have worked the land.
They know the area well.
They have lived their entire lives in this corner far from the madding crowd that modernity has suddenly reached.
They point to the right, where tractors operate among mountains of rubble: there the demolition work of an old village has begun;
To the left, where that barren esplanade: this is going to be the campus of Peking University;
further ahead, where the white construction with a futuristic air: this will be the new sports stadium, which is quite advanced.
And that road over there, they indicate, is the highway that goes to Beijing.
These neighbors usually spend time on the bus looking at the landscape.
They go from their house – given by the Government in exchange for the old expropriated one – to the new high-speed train station, and then back.
Mr. Li, who is in his seventies, says they are now living “the good days.”
And so every day they see Xiongan grow around them, a city created from nothing on the same land where they used to work, and that aspires to be a prototype of a “modern socialist” city.
It is one of the most ambitious projects of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Conceived as a satellite city of Beijing, the brand new city these days reminds us of one of those games in which children build houses on a board.
You can see construction grids and cranes and cement trucks everywhere.
The chosen place is a plain crossed by rivers and wetlands about 100 kilometers south of the Chinese capital, in the province of Hebei.
Its development was announced in style in 2017 as an escape valve from the congested capital of the Asian giant, where almost 22 million people live.
The intention is to encourage the transfer of companies and institutions and thus free Beijing of those functions that are not essential for the nation's Government.
Xiongan bears Xi's personal seal.
The general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party has called it a “national project of millennial significance,” which must be able to “withstand the test of history.”
His planning, he has reiterated, aims to combine cutting-edge technology and ecological respect.
“This is also the legacy that our generation of Chinese communists will bequeath to future generations,” Xi said.
Xiongan, an acronym for two counties in the area, is also a newly coined word made up of two characters: 雄 (Xiong: hero, masculine, strength) and 安 (An: peace, calm, stability).
It will be a legacy with which to evaluate the era of Xi, who last year achieved an unprecedented third presidential term among his immediate predecessors.
Cyclists traveled through the city of Xiongan_on Wednesday.Guillermo Abril
The Government has compared its implementation with two milestones: Shenzhen, the country's first special economic zone, created in 1980 in a fishing village today transformed into a technology megalopolis;
and Pudong, Shanghai's financial district with futuristic skyscrapers.
Both projects were promoted by Deng Xiaoping, architect of the period of opening and reform that triggered Chinese development.
There are articles that take the comparisons further: “In 1153 AD.
C., the Jin Dynasty established its capital in Yanjing, beginning more than 860 years of capital-building history in Beijing.
In 2017, the planning and establishment of the Hebei Xiongan New Area will open a new page in the development of Beijing,” stated a text from the official Xinhua agency.
Beijing has put the machinery into operation.
In almost seven years, more than 4,000 buildings have begun to rise on the former barren lands and ruined towns;
The area has received investments of more than 657 billion yuan (more than 85 billion euros) and Chinese state companies have established more than 200 subsidiaries and branches in the area, according to figures released by state media.
Among the projects under construction is a supercomputing center (the “brain of the city”) that will help power some of Xiongan's digital systems, including platforms for managing traffic flow and autonomous vehicles.
The city is also, since 2021, a testing ground for the digital yuan, backed by the Chinese Central Bank.
The plan requires that basic services be within a 15-minute walk, and requires that energy come primarily from clean energy.
70% of the city is reserved for green areas.
Andrew Stokols, a doctoral candidate in urban planning and policy at MIT, considers Xiongan a “techno-naturalist utopia,” as he wrote last year in
The China Project
.
The city, he added, has acquired “ideological importance” as a “national model of high-quality development,” one of Beijing's mantras in recent years.
“Xiongan has become the physical embodiment of Xi's 'party-state capitalism': refocusing the Chinese Communist Party on urban life, promoting high technology and green innovation through investments in universities, state research institutes and public enterprises. ”.
Stokols acknowledges that many utopian cities failed.
But he believes Xi's “commitment” to Xiongan as a “legacy” could ensure the city continues to receive support from the central government.
And over time, he adds, it could prove “attractive” as a center for research, innovation and a decent quality of life, especially for young university graduates from secondary towns or cities in China.
For now, pretty empty
For now, it seems to be still quite empty.
The high-speed train, which takes less than an hour from Beijing and costs less than seven euros, arrives on any Wednesday with few passengers: the majority get off at Daxing airport, open to the south of the capital, from where it takes about 20 minutes to Xiongan.
The city station, inaugurated in 2020, is gigantic, with white, sinuous lines, with the roofs covered by solar panels.
In its guts you can barely see a soul.
Its hallways are deserted.
The waiting rooms, without people.
But its dimensions, and its multiple platforms, allow us to sense the imagined scale.
At the exit there are advertisements for luxurious homes: “Work in Xiongan, live in a palace,” says one.
In the surroundings you can see wastelands and skeletons of buildings.
From there one can take the aforementioned regular bus with retirees.
For the rest of the journey, which lasts about an hour, no one else boards.
“Maybe it's too early to write [about Xiongan], the change hasn't been noticed yet,” reflects one of the elders.
The bus leaves next to an avenue dotted with red posters with Xi's messages on the streetlights: “National project”, “millennium plan”.
The China State Construction Engineering Corporation, one of the largest in the world in its sector, has its headquarters in this area.
Several restaurants have opened on the next block.
At the door of one of them, chef Guan Wei, 43, says that he moved in 2022 with his family from Dongbei, northwest China.
“There are many state-owned enterprises in Xiongan,” says Guan, who calls the city “Little Beijing.”
In his opinion, “it has very good prospects for the restaurant business in the future.”
At their location, there is a lunch atmosphere on a weekday.
Three employees of an engineering company in Tianjin eat there, a coastal city, also located about 100 kilometers away, and the third vertex of the Beijing-Hebei-Tianjin economic development triangle, in which the new city is framed.
Before saying goodbye, Chef Guan offers dog meat.
Nearby is Rongdong, where clone housing blocks multiply, there are international hotels, futuristic office buildings and a shopping center with the affluence typical of the town square.
It has a cafeteria, cinemas, and shops with luxury brands.
This area, located next to a large park, is expected to articulate residential life, although many of the spaces are still under construction or empty.
It is worth wondering if the slowdown of bricks in China will also be felt here.
At the moment, a good part of the inhabitants are rehoused neighbors, construction workers or people like Hu Yan, 36, who works at an interior design company in charge of several projects.
He lives during the week in one of the newly finished blocks, and every weekend he returns to the capital with his family.
He believes that in the future Xiongan “will be like Beijing.”
“It's going to be a lot better in a couple of years.
There will be schools, universities will come…” says Qiu Ping, 45, a primary school teacher at a local school.
She meets her young son and her mother at the Xiongan Museum.
They usually come after school, the little one likes to play with an interactive real estate development game that is in one of the rooms.
In front of a model of the new city, Qiu says: “This, until three years ago, was agricultural land.”
They, born here, also have rural roots.
“Now we are urban residents,” she emphasizes.
They also expropriated her and gave her a new home in exchange for her.
She uses the same expression as retirees: “the good days” have arrived.
In the museum, with a profusion of screens and lighting effects, at one point you cross a corridor in which a number shines: 2035. By then, according to Beijing's plan, Xiongan "will have basically become a modern, green city." , intelligent and habitable.”
By 2050, the authorities expect it to be placed on the map of large world-class cities as a prototype of a “modern socialist city.”
“Each era has its models and symbols,” concludes another panel at the museum, highlighting how Xiongan, “under the personal decision, deployment and promotion of General Secretary Xi Jinping,” will be “an important witness and participant in the great rejuvenation.” from China".
With this expression, Beijing usually refers to the recovery of the status lost globally after the so-called “century of humiliation” that followed the defeat by the colonial powers.
“The drums are playing…” the panel concludes.
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