NewsVoice Visited Xiong’an New Area – China’s City of the Future

Xiong’an New Area or ”city of the future” is one of China’s biggest city development projects now taking form. Xiong’an will strive to become a world-class, eco-friendly and smart city that the authorities are keen to incorporate in future urban planning projects.

NewsVoice and Swedish Nya Dagbladet were the first news channels from the entire West to have permission to visit Xiong’an, the new Chinese smart city.

Xiong’an New Area is described as a national project of historical, ecological and millennial significance. The construction area is huge. It covers some 1770 square kilometres and spans three counties 130 km to the southwest of Beijing.

It all began with a natural environment consisting of empty fields and wetlands. NewsVoice visited the wetlands of Baiyangdian Lake where the Chinese president himself, Xi Jinping, in 2012 had a vision of a future modern city. Only five or six years later the construction began.

The area will have a dynamic population of 5 million people and a permanent resident population of about 2,5 million. Construction workers are building the city full-time, 24 hours a day in three shifts. The lights are on all night to illuminate the many construction sites.

The city centre appeared to be already finished and operational when NewsVoice had the opportunity to visit the Xiong’an New Area, a city that will include the latest smart technologies. More than 3600 buildings are already in place since the building project started in 2018.

Over 150 State-owned enterprises are now rooted in the area and more than 120,000 people have so far decided to move into the area permanently.

One important purpose of Xiongan New Area is to relieve Beijing of functions non-essential to its role as the national capital. The new city is divided into different areas of functionalities such as IT and telecom, finance and banking, science, innovation and research, education, health care, culture and other functions.

Xiong’an New Area is a part of a greater infrastructure. To reach the city highways and fast tracks for trains are now in place. It only takes 20 minutes with a high-speed train to reach Xiongan from Beijing.

The new area will include three new airports and Underground there is an intricate and vast network of tunnels.

NewsVoice had the opportunity to take a ride in one of the automatic self-driving buses. As a precaution, there was a driver on the bus, but he was not touching the steering wheel.

At one point a somewhat careless driver suddenly cut into the lane of the bus, so the bus had to hit the brakes. It wasn’t bad but the city guide said they are improving the autonomous capacity all the time as the AI control system is continuously self-learning.

Several leading Chinese companies have signed cooperation agreements with Xiong’an’s local government. Companies such as Baidu are testing self-driving vehicles. China Mobile is working on its new 5G remote control driving technology. Alibaba has introduced its Artificial intelligence “City Brain” platform designed for traffic management.