The monument ‘green city’ Xi ordered for himself

Xi Jinping is planning the biggest physical monument in the country’s history, a new mega-city on the dusty northern plains.

Xi Jinping at a site inspection last year for the mega city of Xiongan.

President Xi Jinping is not only rebuilding China’s Communist Party, its government, and its global influence, he is also personally planning the biggest physical monument in the country’s history, a new megacity on the dusty northern plains.

He has ordered the construction at Xiongan, 120km southwest of Beijing, of a city to showcase his “China dream”, with the state-owned corporations leading the way in setting up factories and offices and the country’s hi-tech juggernauts such as Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu alongside them.

He envisages a clean and green metropolis, which will attract the “non-core” sectors from gridlocked Beijing. They would be joined by new-generation businesses such as artificial intelligence, robotics and biopharmaceuticals from all over China.

Morgan Stanley estimates Xiongan will absorb up to $500 billion over the next decade, making it the largest infrastructure project in Chinese history, surpassing the Three Gorges project or the diversion of water from the south to the parched north.

The parallels are clear — and they underline why Xiongan is most likely to succeed.

Deng Xiaoping fathered the construction of Shenzhen from a fishing village near Hong Kong to today’s modern manufacturing dynamo, shooting to 10 million population within 20 years, and a $400bn economy about the size of The Philippines.

Then Jiang Zemin oversaw the creation of Pudong, from a zone of warehouses and rice paddies across the river from Shanghai. Again in under two decades, it became a finance centre with huge skyscrapers, where more than five million people live and work.

Today’s leader, the most powerful since Mao Zedong, has regularly visited construction sites in Xiongan, pursuing every detail of the “thousand-year plan” for what everyone will know as The City That Xi Built. He envisages it becoming part of an even grander project — a megapolis of 150 million living within a triangle comprising the port city of Tianjin, Beijing, and Xiongan, linked by ultra-high-speed communication. A $16bn airport south of Beijing, that will service Xiongan, will open soon. The triangle will give northern China a super-hub to rate alongside the Pearl River Delta in the south, and the Yangtze Delta in the centre.

The big question mark over Xi’s dream city comes from its top-down template. Urban development expert Qiao Runling said there is “a blind worship of leaders, governments, policies and planning”, noting Shenzhen and Pudong grew out of private-­sector demand, bottom-up.

Xu Jianyun runs, at the heart of Xiongan, a family restaurant, specialising in fish caught in nearby Baiyang Lake. It is a typical northern Chinese crossroads town, slightly sleepy, with few buildings reaching higher than four floors. Many work in textile factories.

Xu said this week, that after Xi made a preliminary visit last April to Xiongan — a name concocted of three towns, but also handily meaning “Magnificent Peace” — the speculators leapt in. She is regularly feeding newcomers from Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing. Eighty per cent of diners are outsiders. She provides bulk lunches for some of the 3000 workers on a nearby construction site, where access is determined by facial-recognition devices.

The annual rent for her restaurant has soared 10 times in the past year, to $60,000. She is not complaining too much, though: her family owns a 1000sq m compound now renting for $200,000 a year to a state-owned enterprise that has rushed in to demonstrate its zeal to the top leadership.

The Xiongan New Area is directly accountable to the central committee of the Communist Party, and the state council or cabinet. Xi picked Xu Kuangdi, a fit 80-year-old engineer and scholar, who led Pudong’s development, to head the new authority — which has moved swiftly to secure large tracts of land and to cap speculation. So those looking for lucrative windfalls from compensation for their old properties may end up disappointed. But, Xu said, “there’s no doubt our living standards will improve here, the town’s already much cleaner”.

Among locals, however, “it’s a hot issue as to whether to leave or stay”, in Xu’s family’s case after six generations. “We can’t easily join the hi-tech companies moving in, because we haven’t had that education or experience, and ­people don’t want to end up just as security guards or cleaners.”

“We might become strangers in our own town.”

But she also sees how the next generation may benefit. “In the past, we wanted our kids to go to big cities for work opportunities — but now they can come back here after college.”

Her daughter, derided when she chose to study nutrition, an obscure expertise in old Xiongan, has found a good job locally with a large incoming corporation, China Tower. Her son — originally destined for college in Beijing — may now stay for study.

Xu is contemplating staying open around the clock after discovering a donkey meat restaurant across the road is doing a roaring trade in the early hours from newly arriving shift workers.

A banner in an ancient village on the edge of Xiongan, facing a huge new construction area, says: “The China Dream Is Ahead of You.”

Whether, for ordinary folk, his new city will prove a mirage, a nightmare, or a realised dream, will become a key test of the paramount leader’s mettle as China enters the New Era of Xi