Xiong'an: China's $600 Billion City Built in Physical and Digital Simultaneity

How Xi Jinping's decree created the first city in history designed, built, and governed in real-time physical-digital parallelism, and why almost no one in the West has noticed.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Profile • 2026-05-04

On the morning of April 1, 2017, Xi Jinping announced the creation of a new city in China's Hebei Province, and the world largely dismissed it as a government vanity project. Seven years later, that city has accumulated 33 billion data records in its urban computing center, deployed 5,600 5G base stations across a purpose-built digital road network, completed construction of more than 5,300 buildings, and attracted 1.41 million residents, more than 400 branches of state-owned enterprises, and a satellite manufacturing facility that produced a completed orbiter in under eight months. In March 2026, Xi returned for an inspection tour flanked by three members of the Politburo Standing Committee, a signal in Chinese political theater that carries unmistakable weight. Xiong'an is not finished. It may not even be considered successful by its own metrics yet. But it is something no city has ever been before: a living infrastructure built simultaneously in concrete and in code, where every pipe, road, and building has had a real-time digital twin since the day it was poured.

The Decree and the Design

When Xi designated three counties in Hebei Province, specifically Xiong, Rongcheng, and Anxin, as the Xiong'an New Area, the announcement was made on the same day every year that China traditionally publishes April Fool's jokes. The timing was coincidental, but the reaction was telling: international coverage was shallow, skeptical, and thin. In China, the announcement triggered a real estate frenzy so severe that the government banned property sales within days and arrested speculators by the dozens.

The name itself gives the project away. Xiong'an combines Chinese characters meaning "brave" and "peace," a chosen identity, like most things in Xiong'an, rather than an inherited one. Located 100 kilometers southwest of Beijing and 50 kilometers east of Baoding, the area had previously been most notable for Baiyangdian, the largest freshwater lake in North China, which had degraded over decades from Grade III water quality to Grade V, the lowest in the Chinese assessment system. Restoring that lake was written into Xiong'an's founding mandate alongside building the city itself. The forest coverage rate in the surrounding area has since climbed from 11 percent to 35.1 percent; the lake has recovered to Grade III.

The structural logic behind the project was not ecological nostalgia but metropolitan arithmetic. Beijing had become functionally ungovernable as a place to concentrate everything: government, universities, hospitals, corporations, and nearly 22 million people. Xi's answer was to mandate dispersal. Xiong'an would receive the non-capital functions of Beijing, including the universities, the state enterprise headquarters, the research institutes, and the back-office functions of government, while Beijing retained politics, culture, diplomacy, and science. The Jing-Jin-Ji integration plan, linking Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei into a single regional economy, needed a third hub. Xiong'an was that hub.

The Three Cities Doctrine

What makes Xiong'an genuinely unlike anything built before is a foundational design principle that officials describe as building "three cities simultaneously": the physical city above ground, the digital city in the cloud, and the utility city underground. The underground network alone includes vast tunnel corridors for maintenance access, logistics, power, water, gas, and communications, with every pipeline carrying a real-time sensor feed into the city's computing center.

Above ground, the doctrine that has driven construction since 2017 is simultaneous physical-digital parallelism. Liu Xin, general manager of China Xiong'an Group Digital City Technology Co., Ltd., has described the principle in precise terms: every building, road, and pipeline in Xiong'an has a corresponding 3D digital model constructed at the same time as the physical structure. There is no retrofitting. There is no scanning existing infrastructure to create after-the-fact models. The digital model is built as the bricks are laid. The result, as of 2025, is that the Xiong'an Urban Computing Center has accumulated more than 33 billion data records and supports complex analytics across government services, urban planning, and ecological monitoring.

The computing center itself has become something of a landmark. Located in the western part of the Rongdong District, it is designed in the shape of a human eye and is locally known as the "Eye of Xiong'an." Inside, servers run a system integrating edge computing, cloud computing, supercomputing, and intelligent computing. All of the underlying technology, from chips and servers to cloud platforms, is domestically developed. Storage capacity currently stands at 50 petabytes, with expansion to 1,000 petabytes planned. The center provides the computing backbone for the Xiong'an Pass, a digital identity card that has now been issued to more than 810,000 residents and has been used over 6 million times for access to government services, healthcare, transportation, and retail.

The Traffic That Watches the Cars

There is no better entry point into what Xiong'an's infrastructure actually feels like than its traffic system. Zhang Yan, who moved to the city four years ago and leads the team that deployed the system across the Rongdong district, describes the experience simply: in Xiong'an, cars no longer watch the traffic lights. The traffic lights watch the cars.

Behind what officials call the "green-wave traffic system" are more than 20,000 roadside sensors monitoring traffic flow, queue lengths, and vehicle types in real time. That data feeds into the AI-powered city brain, which recalibrates traffic signals in milliseconds. According to official figures, the average number of stops per vehicle has fallen by 50 percent. Long stretches of uninterrupted green lights, the "green-wave corridors," have become a defining experience of driving in the city.

The same sensor network that manages traffic also provides flood alerts, powers drone delivery corridors, and links into the underground utility monitoring system. Quadruped robots from State Grid Xiong'an patrol underground cable tunnels, equipped with visible light cameras, infrared sensors, toxic gas detectors, and audio monitoring, navigating confined spaces that would be dangerous for human maintenance workers. More than 500 kilometers of digital roads have been completed, and 5,600 5G base stations deployed. Full coverage of IPv6 has been achieved across all terminals, systems, and websites.

The Enterprise Migration

Numbers that should have drawn more Western attention: by 2026, more than 4,000 companies with Beijing origins have relocated to Xiong'an, and more than 400 branches of centrally administered state-owned enterprises have set up operations. The China Satellite Network Group, which oversees China's national satellite internet constellation, became the first central SOE to officially relocate in September 2024. China Huaneng Group and Sinochem Holdings followed in October 2025, each holding flag-raising ceremonies in Xiong'an on the first working day after the National Day holiday. More than 1,000 Huaneng employees and nearly 1,000 Sinochem employees began operations that day. The Jingjinji Intercity Railway Investment company, a subsidiary of China State Railway Group, followed in the same month.

Total completed investment in the new area had surpassed 860 billion yuan, approximately $119 billion, by the end of February 2026. The Morgan Stanley projection from 2017 estimated that Xiong'an would draw as much as 2.4 trillion yuan, or roughly $380 billion, over its full development horizon: thirteen times the cost of the Three Gorges Dam. That figure is no longer abstract. The next Five-Year Plan period (2026-2030) is projected to add a further 1 trillion yuan in major project construction alone.

In February 2026, the State Council approved the upgrade of the Xiong'an high-tech industrial development zone to national-level status. The upgraded zone covers 20.84 square kilometers across two sections. The decision was a bureaucratic escalation that carries practical weight in China's planning system: national-level designation unlocks a different tier of policy support, tax incentives, and regulatory flexibility for enterprises operating within the zone.

The Satellite Inside the City That the Satellite Orbits

Of everything that has happened in Xiong'an since 2017, the detail most likely to stop a reader cold involves a satellite called "Xiong'an-1." The satellite was manufactured by Beijing LandSpace HongQing Technology Co., a subsidiary of LandSpace, the commercial rocket company that became the first in the world to launch a methane-liquid oxygen rocket to orbit. HongQing Technology moved its operations to Xiong'an, and under the terms of what the Chinese press calls "Xiong'an speed," completed registration, construction, production, and product rollout all within the same year. Regulatory approval came in the first quarter of 2025. R&D, design, production, and testing were completed within eight months. The satellite rolled off the production line on October 22, 2025. It is currently in fault simulation and flight condition testing, with a planned launch and in-orbit verification expected in the second quarter of 2026.

This is the recursive detail: a satellite built inside the city it was designed to serve, intended to orbit the city from which it was manufactured. Xiong'an's aerospace information sector is one of its designated pillar industries. Around 60 enterprises in the aerospace information space have now located there, clustering around the China Satellite Network Group headquarters and benefiting from the proximity to both upstream supply chain partners and the Zhongguancun Science Park replicated inside Xiong'an's boundaries. AI startup Huaqing Zhiyan, which moved to Xiong'an in mid-2024, saw its contract value grow from 3-4 million yuan to 26 million yuan by the end of 2025, with more than one-third coming from local projects inside the city, including satellite-based farmland imaging for China Satellite Network.

The Counterargument and What It Proves

No honest account of Xiong'an can ignore the videos. Footage circulating on Chinese social media in 2025 and 2026 shows wide avenues with light traffic, residential blocks with limited activity, and shuttered storefronts. One widely-circulated clip captured a resident's bewilderment at the quiet: going downstairs to pick up a package and finding what felt like a no-man's land. Scholars and journalists who have visited describe a city that has been built but not yet inhabited at the scale the official narrative implies. An analyst who spoke to Radio Free Asia under the pseudonym Fu Tao described the situation precisely: Xiong'an's popularity and public expectations remain low. "If a city constantly needs policies to arrange for people to move there," one Beijing-based regional economist told the same outlet, "it suggests its intrinsic appeal is still insufficient."

The critique is valid and important. Xiong'an's 1.41 million residents are far below the 2-to-3 million target set by the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Income levels are widely described by residents as fourth-tier while housing costs trend toward first-tier. The city lacks the organic commercial density that makes cities feel alive. Unlike Shenzhen, which grew because market forces flooded in to exploit a special economic zone, Xiong'an is being grown through state mandate: enterprises are required to relocate, employees are given subsidized housing, and supply chains are expected to follow. The spontaneous energy is not there yet.

But the critique also has a structural limit. The technology infrastructure that skeptics dismiss as vanity is actually load-bearing for everything Xiong'an is attempting. The digital twin does not become less real because the streets are quiet. The 33 billion data records do not disappear because storefronts are shuttered. The question is not whether Xiong'an's technology works; the evidence on that is clear. The question is instead whether the technology can eventually function as the organizing principle for a city that people choose to inhabit rather than are assigned to.

What the West Missed

The global conversation about planned cities at scale was dominated, for years, by NEOM. Saudi Arabia's $500 billion megaproject captured every architectural publication, every infrastructure investor briefing, and every futurist forum. Its flagship component, The Line, was a 170-kilometer mirror-walled linear city designed to house 9 million people with no cars and no carbon emissions. In January 2024, reports surfaced that The Line had been scaled back to 2.4 kilometers, a reduction of 98.6 percent. The project as originally conceived has effectively ceased to exist as a near-term proposition.

While NEOM was consuming the world's attention, China was doing something quieter and harder: building an actual city, in parallel physical and digital form, with real people moving in, real enterprises relocating under real compulsion, and real technology operating in real streets. Whether Xiong'an achieves its population targets or economic ambitions is a genuinely open question. Whether it has already produced the most sophisticated municipal digital infrastructure ever built from the ground up is not. The city is three things at once: a test of whether sovereignty can hard-code governance into urban form; a proving ground for every technology China wants to lead at scale, from AI traffic management to satellite manufacturing; and an honest reckoning, playing out in slow motion, with the limits of top-down city-making in a country where citizens no longer accept the premise of being assigned to a place without choosing it. The "Eye of Xiong'an" watches the city. The city is still deciding whether to look back.