Why Xi Jinping’s $85 billion legacy city is standing empty

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

For many of China’s

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