The Daily Populous Saturday January 4th, 2025 evening edition
Authored by thetimes.com and submitted by TimesandSundayTimes

It may be a “model city in the history of human development”, as the promotional literature says, but there are very few people on the streets of President Xi’s legacy project for China.

The traffic runs smoothly, and this may in part be due to the efficiency of Xiong’an’s futuristic town planning, its networks of fibre optic cables buried underground that operate everything from facial recognition systems to — theoretically — self-driving cars. Or it may just be that there is hardly any traffic.

That will no doubt come when the state-run companies and scientific institutes Xi has ordered to relocate here comply with his wishes. Whether they can persuade their employees to move here with them is another matter.

Xiong’an lies 70 miles to the south of Beijing REX

snowytheNPC on January 4th, 2025 at 14:59 UTC »

It may be hard to believe, but unfinished buildings in the middle of construction typically have low occupancy rates

emptycagenowcorroded on January 3rd, 2025 at 21:23 UTC »

$85 billion seems awfully cheap to get a whole city

South_Telephone_1688 on January 3rd, 2025 at 20:59 UTC »

As the article states, the city isn't complete -- in fact it hardly started; the project isn't planned to be completed until around 2050. What a nothing burger article.

China is unlike other countries in that it builds the cities/infrastructure before people move into them. This city is located right south of Beijing, so I highly doubt there will be any problems with occupancy once it's completed.