Xiongan development needs patience
It’s not very good timing for the Xiongan New Area to rapidly grow into a megacity like Shenzhen, South China’s Guangdong Province, or the Pudong area of Shanghai, considering the current situation, and more patience is needed in this 1,000-year project, a Chinese professor said.
The comments were made after recent media reports saying that Xiongan is off to a slow start, with lost jobs, shuttered factories and a gold rush that has gone bust.
The Xiongan New Area, established on April 1, 2017, is a new economic zone located in North China’s Hebei Province. It is the third new area of national significance after Shenzhen and Pudong in Shanghai.
The rise of Shenzhen and Pudong was boosted by growth momentum in China decades ago when the nation had just opened its door to the world, Yin Zhi, an expert participating in Xiongan’s planning, was quoted as saying in a post published by the local government on Wednesday.
In the past two years, China’s economy has been facing challenges due to sluggish investment, exports and consumption, and the ongoing trade war will make the situation even worse. “It may take longer than expected for Xiongan to become a city where business flourishes,” Yin said.
The slow progress in Xiongan has also been caused by unfavorable local conditions such as transport planning and flood controls near Baiyangdian, the largest freshwater lake in northern China. It takes a lot of engineering treatment to make the land reclamation safe, to prevent land from becoming water-logged and to restore the area’s environment.
“If ecosystem problems could not be solved, the new area will be like a luxury villa in the middle of dump, which will not meet high standards adopted by the central government,” said the expert.
The construction of Xiongan is a thousand-year-project, which should be marketdriven with systemic reforms, Yin noted.
“By 2030, if Xiongan could not be recognized in public and could not attract global investment, it would be a total failure,” he said.