Chapter II – Xiong’an: A City for One Man

It is difficult to write about a city that exists in form, but not in life.

Xiong’an, announced in 2017 by Xi Jinping as “a millennium plan of national significance,” is not the product of urban evolution, but of political revelation. Most cities emerge from necessity—harbours for merchants, citadels for defence, or riverbanks for sustenance.

Xiong’an, however, begins with abstraction. Its origin lies not in the footsteps of migration or the logic of trade, but in a top-down algorithm of control. It is a city imagined by policy, assembled by decree, and flattened by symbolism before a single brick was laid. This rupture from the evolutionary DNA of cities reveals its core character: not a city that grows, but one that asserts. A tabula rasa soaked in purpose. A city built to enshrine the will of one man. A man who abolished term limits, and crowned himself emperor for life.

Situated some 100 km southwest of Beijing in Hebei Province, the Xiong’an New Area spans over 2,000 km², encompassing the counties of Xiongxian, Rongcheng, and Anxin. Its centrepiece is Baiyangdian Lake, historically a wetland ecosystem now reframed as ecological ornament in glossy renders. The Baiyangdian Lake, long known as the “Kidney of North China,” once supported thousands of fisherfolk and farmers whose livelihoods were woven within the rhythm of wetlands. Folktales, dialects, boat traditions—entire cultural microcosms flourished on its banks. 

In today’s renderings, however, the lake is abstracted into a turquoise ellipse, framed by mirrored towers and algorithmic parks. Nature becomes ornament. History becomes disruption. Culture becomes residue.

It is often described in slogans: innovation hub, green utopia, digital pioneer, backup capital. In the Party’s modern mythos, each paramount leader leaves behind a territorial signature: Mao had Tiananmen, Deng drew a circle that became Shenzhen, and Jiang’s push transformed Pudong into skyline and finance. Xiong’an, then, emerges as Xi’s inscription—not through market force or urban logic, but sovereign will. It is not a response to opportunity, but a desire to mirror legacy. To etch a name into the land through decree. 

But beneath these glowing labels lies a more ancient architectural impulse—to enshrine power through space. A capital without a crown. A city without citizens. A mausoleum still under construction for a leader not yet gone.

The design of Xiong’an is meticulous, mathematical. Its masterplans are drawn with cosmic precision, as if the alignment of lakes and towers could summon legitimacy. Canals are carved like calligraphy. Roads unfurl in grids of symbolic geometry. The city’s centre, like Tiananmen, is governed by axis—the spatial metaphor of control. In renders, towers gleam, trees align, data flows. And yet, it feels airless. Too perfect to breathe.

Xiong’an is not just designed—it is performed.
The city’s identity is sculpted more through images than inhabitants: looping drone videos, CGIs of “smart governance,” and sterile renderings of public squares void of public life. In this regime of visibility, aesthetics is not for joy, but for compliance. The city becomes a spectacle to be admired from afar, rather a habitat to be lived in.
As Guy Debord once noted, spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relationship mediated by images. In Xiong’an, the relationship is vertical, not communal.

What makes Xiong’an uncanny is its disregard for memory. It is not built on ruins, but on erasure.

In 2015, at the age of twenty-three, I was an intern at the China Architectural Design and Research Group. One afternoon, my supervisor quietly assigned me to a new team, describing it as a political task of utmost importance. We later learned it was a feasibility analysis for what would soon be announced as the Xiong’an New Area.

I remember opening the GIS map of the Baiyangdian region—lush wetlands intertwined with waterways, dotted with quiet villages. The lead architect hovered over the satellite image, pen in hand, sketching out rough outlines of the new civic square. I hesitated, then asked, “But what about the people in those villages?”

“They will be relocated by the government,” he replied, as if stating a weather forecast.

Relocated. Such a clean word. Behind it, generations uprooted. Graves moved. Histories erased.

That evening, I sat at my desk, modelled the day’s sketch in Sketchup and traced the lines in AutoCAD, unable to erase the face of the elderly villager I imagined walking past that soon-to-be boulevard. No one in the room spoke of compensation, or culture, or memory. It was just lines and targets, deadlines, and the rhetoric of the nation. 

I remember wondering, as a young architecture student, whether the purpose of architecture was still to build for life—or merely for narrative.

Keller Easterling calls such places infrastructure space—urban forms that function not as environments, but as policy objects. They do not grow; they operate. Xiong’an is not merely a city by the will of one man, but a dashboard—something to be managed, observed, optimised. A live model for the governing mind.

As of April 2025, the development has seen cumulative investment of some ¥906.3 billion—over US $125 billion—across nearly 380 key projects, covering around 202 km². Earlier figures from 2022–24 cited ¥400 billion by September 2022, growing to ¥670 billion across 383 projects. A recent wave of 70 new flagship projects alone accounted for ¥53.7 billion. Fixed asset investment in Xiong’an has now breached ¥5.26 trillion.

And yet, no meaningful public consultation ever took place.

This city, touted as a “backup capital,” is being built with astronomical state funds at a time when China faces severe economic headwinds—slowing growth, ballooning local debt, and a faltering real estate sector. If Xiong’an is meant to be for the people, why were the people not asked? Why were rural communities erased, landscapes transformed—without consent, without voice, without mourning?

In 2023, when the heaviest rains in decades swept through the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region, priorities were made clear in official statements: “Protect Beijing. Protect Xiong’an. Protect the grand plan.” And so the map was redrawn by floodwaters. Villages in Baoding, farmlands in Zhuozhou, towns along the Baiyangdian basin—became involuntary reservoirs. Evacuation warnings came late. Compensation was uncertain. Some called it a sacrifice for the future. But whose future?

A city unborn was protected. A city that remembers was drowned.

By 2025, the myth of speculative glory has imploded. Once-hyped property prices, inflated by propaganda and frenzy, have collapsed by nearly half. Speculators who paid top yuan in hopes of a Shenzhen-style boom now face ghost blocks propped up by slogans, not tenants. New campuses—like the Beijing University of Technology Xiong’an Campus—are wrapped in banners, but seemingly waiting for students who never arrived. Offices remain unfurnished. Shopping malls sit empty. A high-speed railway station, larger than 66 football fields, gleams with glass and solar panels—yet feels more like a shrine than a terminal. A theatre before the actors arrive.

One cannot help but ask: who is this city for?

It claims to be for the future, for the people, for the nation. But so far, it resembles less a home than a monument. A city whose purpose is not to shelter life, but to immortalise command.

The emperor has built himself a city.
But the people have not come.
Not yet. Perhaps not ever.