About a decade ago, China declared a city into existence. A stretch of low-lying farmland and wetlands 100 kilometers southwest of the capital — prone to flooding, sparsely settled, and largely forgotten — was designated one of the most important urban development project in modern Chinese history. Xiong’an New Area, the government announced, was a “millennium plan.” Construction would begin immediately.
Today, that city covers roughly 215 square kilometers of developed land. More than 5,000 buildings have risen from the ground. Over 1.4 million people live there. China’s first zero-carbon industrial park, evaluated under national standards, was recently completed within its boundaries. And a downtown computing center — locally nicknamed the “Eye of Xiong’an” — processes more than 38 billion data entries while managing traffic signals, underground utilities, and government services across a city that barely existed a decade ago.
By most measures, this would be extraordinary progress. Yet Xiong’an is also, by its own benchmarks, well behind schedule — and still, by most accounts, quite empty.
Xiong’an’s Vision: a Smart City that Solves Beijing’s Over-Centralization Problem
To understand the project, you have to understand Beijing’s particular problem. The capital is home to roughly 23 million official residents — only about 1.5 percent of China’s total population, yet host to a disproportionate share of its government ministries, state-owned enterprise headquarters, elite universities, and research institutions. The result is a city that is vast, expensive, congested, and functionally over-leveraged as China’s administrative nerve center.
President Xi Jinping’s solution was not to fix Beijing, but to relieve it. Xiong’an was designed to absorb the bureaucratic infrastructure that doesn’t need to be in the capital: SOE headquarters, government agencies, R&D facilities, university campuses, hospitals. Beijing would remain China’s political center. Xiong’an would take on everything else.
The new area ranks alongside Shenzhen and Shanghai’s Pudong district as one of three “special zones of national significance” — a status that gives it direct oversight from the CCP Central Committee and State Council, rather than through the normal provincial hierarchy.
But Xiong’an isn’t meant to be just a functional overflow valve. The plan calls for a genuine rethinking of how a Chinese city works. Its urban design is built around the “15-minute city” concept: every resident should be able to reach daily goods and services on foot. The standard is precise — a forest within 3 kilometers, a green belt within 1 kilometer, a park within 300 meters of every home. The city is being built as a smart city from the ground up, with AI, sensors, and digital infrastructure embedded into the urban fabric before residents arrive, rather than layered on afterward.
Economically, Xiong’an is deliberately closed to foreign investment. China intends it as an engine for state-owned enterprises and domestic firms — a counterpoint to the export-driven, foreign-capital model that defined Shenzhen’s rise. Where Shenzhen was built on global integration, Xiong’an is being built on state direction.
The State of Construction: Progress and the Gaps
The physical development is real and, in some respects, ahead of where comparable greenfield projects tend to be at the nine-year mark. As of early 2026, more than 4,000 Beijing-origin companies have relocated operations to Xiong’an, and more than 400 centrally administered state-owned enterprises have set up branches there. Sinochem, China Huaneng Group, China Satellite Network Group, and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Railway Company have all moved their headquarters out of Beijing and into the new city — some completed, others still under construction.
The high-speed rail link to Beijing opened in December 2020, with journey times of around 30 minutes. Beijing Daxing International Airport, opened in 2019, is a 20-minute train ride away. An international air cargo terminal was activated in March 2026 — the first in China not physically located at an airport — giving Xiong’an a direct air freight channel through a dedicated airline code and customs clearing operation at Daxing.
Over 100,000 students have relocated from Beijing universities to new Xiong’an campuses. The city now issues what it calls the “Xiong’an Pass” — a third-generation social security card giving residents access to government, healthcare, transportation, and commercial services through a unified platform.
And yet. When Xi Jinping visited in March 2026 — his fourth inspection since 2017 — his language was conspicuously urgent. He called on officials to “throw themselves into the work of implementation.” He urged them to “emancipate the mind, broaden thinking, strengthen coordination, and pool efforts.”
Construction targets set in the original 2018 master plan have slipped. Central Xiong’an remains sparsely populated relative to its built capacity. The city’s official resident count of 1.41 million falls well short of the 5 million target set for 2035 — a goal that now looks optimistic given current trajectory.
Why Filling a New City Is Harder Than Building One
The structural challenge Xiong’an faces isn’t primarily logistical. It’s human.
Several analysts and scholars who spoke to Western and international media outlets in the wake of Xi’s March 2026 visit pointed to a consistent problem: that being assigned to Xiong’an is widely perceived among Chinese civil servants as a career demotion. Proximity to central leadership in Beijing confers access, influence, and visibility that no high-speed rail connection can fully replicate. In a political system where informal proximity to power often matters more than formal authority, moving 100 kilometers away carries a real professional cost.
The ground conditions have also complicated construction itself. Xiong’an sits on alluvial soil that is seasonally variable — waterlogged during floods, more compact in dry periods — making deep foundations for monumental buildings more technically demanding and expensive than anticipated.
Housing policy adds another layer of friction. Home buyers must hold a Beijing or Xiong’an hukou, an internal passport that ties a person’s legal residency, and access to public services, to a specific place. Alternatively, buyers must have contributed to the local social security system for at least five years. Property owners in Xiong’an are prohibited from buying property elsewhere in China. These restrictions — designed to prevent the kind of speculative buying frenzy that erupted immediately after the 2017 announcement, when local property prices surged overnight — also suppress organic demand from people who might otherwise choose to move.
The Digital Infrastructure That Sets Xiong’an Apart
Whatever the population shortfall, Xiong’an’s technological build-out is arguably its most advanced component — and the one most likely to define its long-term character.
The Xiong’an Urban Computing Center, which serves as the city’s digital operations backbone, runs an integrated system combining edge computing, cloud computing, supercomputing, and intelligent computing. It currently holds 50 petabytes of storage with a planned expansion to 1,000 petabytes. Every government service system in the new area runs through it. Private and state-owned enterprises including China Satellite Network Group and the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have also deployed operations there.
Every building, road, and pipeline in Xiong’an has a digital ID. Traffic signals in the Rongdong district adjust in real time based on traffic flow using AI. Underground utility tunnels are monitored through digital twin technology and building information modeling. The entire city is covered by IPv6, the HarmonyOS ecosystem, and a comprehensive sensor network.
This “AI-native” design philosophy — building intelligence into urban infrastructure from the ground up rather than retrofitting it later — is what distinguishes Xiong’an from older smart city projects. Rather than layering digital tools onto an existing urban fabric, Xiong’an was designed with AI as a foundational assumption.
The zero-carbon industrial park recently completed there extends the same logic into energy and manufacturing: green power direct supply, distributed energy systems, smart micro-grids, and deep integration between renewable power and industrial processes. It is the first in China to be evaluated under national standards, and is cited by state media as a proof of concept for the roughly 100 zero-carbon industrial parks planned under China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030).
The Political Stakes of Xi’s Personal Project
No accounting of Xiong’an’s progress can ignore the political dimension. This is, with unusual explicitness, Xi Jinping’s project. Official documents describe his personal role in planning, decision-making, and driving the initiative forward. State media frames the decision to build Xiong’an as “one of lasting importance for the coming millennium.” Xi has visited four times since 2017 — more frequently than Chinese leadership typically visits specific development projects.
That personal ownership creates a particular kind of institutional pressure. Projects endorsed at the highest levels of the CCP are rarely publicly reassessed, regardless of mixed outcomes. When Xi declared during his March 2026 visit that the decision to build Xiong’an was “entirely correct,” it wasn’t just a confidence signal — it was a directive about how the project should be discussed within the party.
The 2035 completion target remains official. Whether it’s achievable depends on factors that administrative pressure alone can’t resolve: whether the universities and research institutes relocating to Xiong’an can seed an innovation ecosystem with genuine pull, whether housing and hukou reforms make it easier for workers to root families there, and whether the city’s AI-native infrastructure proves to be a competitive advantage rather than just a design feature.