Can China’s Communist Party build an innovation capital by decree?
President Xi Jinping envisions Xiongan – a hi-tech hub three times the size of New York City – as the next chapter in the development of modern China
Farmers in Rongcheng county often stop to stare at the cement trucks running through their cornfields outside this dusty, frigid town south of Beijing. They are watching the destruction of their livelihoods for the promise of a more prosperous future.
Chinese President Xi Jinping stood in nearby fields in April to herald a project “crucial for the next millennium”. Officials described a massive hi-tech hub three times the size of New York City that would resuscitate poor areas and transform how China builds urban centres.
They called it Xiongan, “magnificent peace”.
The country’s sprawling propaganda apparatus compared it in significance to Shenzhen, the wealthy southern metropolis where China first loosened suffocating Mao-era controls and dealt itself in as an aggressive new player in the global economy.
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Xi, the most authoritarian leader since Mao Zedong, envisions Xiongan as the next chapter of the four-decade boom that helped define modern China. Only this time, he is betting on the Communist Party, more than the markets, to steer it.
A richer, more assertive China faces an unprecedented political test. Shenzhen lit the fuse for decades of rapid economic growth without regard for the legacies of environmental degradation, shoddy construction or gaping inequality. Xiongan is intended to avoid those downsides through a more controlled approach – the world’s most modern, sustainable city created by fiat.
