Beijing Watch | Xiongan, China's 'Millennium City,' Still Empty

Xiongan New Area, the flagship "millennium plan" Beijing launched in April 2017 to relieve pressure on the capital, remains largely empty nearly a decade later. Official figures show barely 120,000 people living in the project's newly built districts, against tens of millions of square metres of finished construction.

Step off the intercity rail at Baiyangdian Station — the closest stop to what officials once called a once-in-a-generation urban experiment — and the gap between ambition and occupancy is immediate. The trains run on time, the roads are immaculate, the buildings gleam in the Hebei sun. What's missing is people.

Official documents framed Xiongan as comparable in ambition to the founding of Shenzhen and the development of Shanghai's Pudong district. Nearly eight years on, the physical infrastructure is largely in place: residential towers delivered, office parks finished, wide boulevards cutting through landscaped districts. Yet across multiple visits, including the most recent, this reporter found the streets, parks, and commercial zones conspicuously quiet — even on weekdays.

"There's just nobody here, normally," said one local party-government official who declined to be named. A separate source familiar with Xiongan's construction described large sections of the new city as still "waiting for residents to move in."

China's official data puts Xiongan's permanent population at roughly 1.4 to 1.5 million. The figure is misleading: most of those residents are original villagers and households relocated through demolition and resettlement. The genuinely new urban districts — Rongdong, Rongxi, and Xiongdong — are estimated to house only around 120,000 people, a thin figure against tens of millions of square metres of built floor area.

​Nighttime occupancy tells a similar story. Many completed apartment towers show few lit windows after dark. Nearby retail clusters remain sparse, with some storefronts yet to open. Without a car, getting between shops, parks, and transport hubs depends on a bus network with infrequent service and long wait times. Shared-bicycle networks common in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen are absent from Xiongan's streets, and autonomous vehicles operate only in limited, patchy zones.​

Among those who have formally relocated — mostly staff from Beijing ministries, state-owned enterprises, and institutions reassigned under the non-capital-functions policy — locals describe a "Beijing-Xiongan migratory bird" pattern: workdays in Xiongan, weekends back in Beijing, where children's schools, spouses' jobs, and family life remain anchored.

The commute underscores the distance. From Beijing South Station, the intercity rail to Baiyangdian — the nearest station to the new districts — takes over an hour, and Xiongan Station is a further 30 kilometres beyond that. It's roughly the distance of a high-speed rail trip from Taipei to Taichung.

Xiongan's planning ambitions are visible everywhere: a three-level underground transport hub, city-wide AI governance systems, and expansive "millennial forests" meant to produce a city without the congestion and pollution of older Chinese megacities. The hardware investment shows. The Xiongan New Area Library, a past winner of an Asian international library award, is architecturally striking — and nearly empty on a recent weekend.

The summer heat exposed a further tension. With temperatures approaching 40 degrees Celsius, the city's wide green spaces offered little relief; many newly planted trees have yet to mature, leaving pedestrians with minimal shade between metro stops and residential blocks. Entertainment options remain limited outside a handful of commercial centres. In one shopping mall, a "Party-Mass Service Centre" sits inside an otherwise AI-forward retail complex — a juxtaposition striking enough to recall a scene from Liu Cixin's science-fiction novel "The Three-Body Problem."

Authorities have begun courting major Chinese internet firms to set up in Xiongan. E-commerce platform Pinduoduo registered a Xiongan subsidiary in May 2026 with 500 million yuan in capital and has launched a recruitment drive for more than 5,000 positions in customer service, content moderation, and operations. The first hires have already reported for work.

The pay is drawing scrutiny. Entry-level moderation roles, which require at least a junior college diploma, pay around 3,800 yuan a month after social insurance deductions — against rents, utilities, and living costs that are rising as the city fills in. Hebei's provincial wages generally trail China's eastern coastal provinces by a wide margin, a gap comparable, in relative terms, to the distance between Taipei and counties like Taitung or Pingtung.

Beijing has signaled impatience. New directives this year require institutions that haven't yet relocated to accelerate their move to Xiongan, with education bodies, hospitals, state enterprises, universities, and research institutes named as priority targets. Xi Jinping's visit to the city in March was widely read as pressure on bureaucratic laggards to keep to the timeline; state media coverage around the visit intensified accordingly.

Funding problems that briefly stalled construction in 2024 — notably after, not during, the pandemic, and involving China State Construction Engineering Corporation, the conglomerate responsible for most of Xiongan's build — have added further uncertainty. Completion, originally targeted for 2027, now looks more realistically like a post-2030 prospect.

The engineering phase of Xiongan is essentially done. What remains untested is whether administrative pressure — reassigned bureaucrats, directed corporate relocations, property sales restricted to local employees — can substitute for the organic pull that normally draws people to cities. Whether China's top-down model can answer that question is, on the evidence so far, still genuinely open.

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