Building a dream city under Xi Jinping

Building a dream city under Xi Jinping



On a grey day in late February 2017, Chinese leader Xi Jinping gathered with a handful of close advisers to survey crop fields and polluted wetlands about 100 kilometres south of the capital, Beijing.To get more news about citynews service, you can citynewsservice.cn official website.

Just over a month later, the future of these backwaters would change drastically as China announced Xi's plan of "1,000-year significance" to transform the area into an eco-friendly, high-tech hub that would serve as the country's sub-capital and a new model for urban planning.

At the time, the plan to launch "Xiong'an New Area" raised questions - including how the new city would deal with the environmental challenges known to plague the low-lying, marshy area, which is prone to floods and droughts.

Six years on, those questions have returned as Beijing and the surrounding Hebei province, where Xiong'an is located, grapple with the aftermath of record rains and floods that killed dozens and displaced more than 1.5 million people in late July and early August.

No major flooding was reported in Xiong'an's main urban areas, where offices for dozens of state-owned enterprises are under construction.

But the surrounding devastation has underlined concerns about the decision to build a multi-billion dollar city on a flood-prone plain.

It's also raised questions about the extent to which Xi's dream city - and the political pressure to protect it - influenced how officials made decisions about how to deal with the floodwaters from a storm that was the region's worst flooding event since Xiong'an was built.
As heavy rains moved towards the region in late July, China's top flood control officials met to plan their response. Among their priorities was to keep the capital Beijing and Xiong'an "absolutely safe" - a demand repeated several times in the days that followed.

The mountainous western outskirts of Beijing were hit first, as flash floods triggered by the heaviest rainfall in 140 years swept away cars, bridges and roads.

Further downstream, officials had to make difficult decisions about how to deal with the swirling floodwaters that poured from the mountains into rivers that meandered through towns, villages and farmland on the Hebei plains.
On 30 July, the first of these decisions was to release water into the "flood storage zones" - designated areas for emergency overflow of floodwaters where hundreds of thousands of people live.

Zhuozhou, a city south of Beijing, was the worst hit, with streets, homes and neighbourhoods submerged in metres of murky water. On social media, some residents claimed they had no warning, while others said the evacuation notices came too late or did not explain how serious the situation was.Floodwaters also submerged villages and farmland in Bazhou, another Hebei city, where dozens of residents protested outside city government offices to demand compensation, according to videos posted on social media.


CNN has contacted the governments of Zhuozhou and Bazhou for comment. Under Chinese law, residents of flood storage areas are entitled to compensation for 70% of the damage to their homes.

Suggestions by officials that decisions to release floodwaters in Zhuozhou and elsewhere in Hebei were made to minimise the impact on the capital Beijing, Xiong'an and the port city of Tianjin have also caused a backlash.

In particular, Hebei's Party chief Ni Yuefeng angered some by describing the province as a "moat" for Beijing. Censors later deleted his comments from the Chinese internet.

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