Population will be curbed to avoid 'big city diseases'
○ The 2,000-square-kilometer mini-city of Xiongan will draw thousands of Beijing government workers
○ The anticipation for the future of Xiongan has already pushed up land and rental prices
○ A series of reforms will curb speculation and make Xiongan's housing affordable
For years, Aowei Road, a major thoroughfare running through Rongcheng county, North China's Hebei Province, was where the local government and some clothing shops were located.
Today, it has been dubbed by residents as the "road of central government-owned enterprises" after a slew of big corporations, such as the State Power Investment Corporation, China Communications Construction and the State Development & Investment Corporation, opened their offices there.
This all happened in under six months earlier this year, after China announced in April a massive plan to develop "Xiongan New Area."
Spanning the counties of Xiongxian, Rongcheng and Anxin, the 2,000-square-kilometer "mini-city" of Xiongan will take over Beijing's so-called non-capital functions, such as large enterprises, financial institutions, colleges and research institutions, helping to relieve pressure in the congested capital.
According to estimates made by the management committee of Xiongan New Area, in the six months following its establishment, 65 companies have already moved there from Beijing. At night, yellow lights from all the new office buildings illuminate the once-dark, quiet little town.
But the surge in population will also bring new challenges, including difficulties finding housing, setting up a transportation infrastructure and establishing social welfare. How to build a livable green city that meets the needs of these new transplants will be the top priority for the city's planners and administrators.
Population limit
A study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) this April said that Xiongan should try to avoid overpopulation, a common phenomenon in many big Chinese cities that has lead to housing, transportation and environmental problems.
With its current population of 1.13 million, the study said that Xiongan's future population should be maintained within 5 million. Reports by the Xinhua News Agency, however, put the future population of Xiongan at around 2.5 million.
Huang Qunhui, director of the Institute of Industrial Economics at CASS, said the relocation of one million people to Xiongan is realizable with the transfer of Beijing's non-capital functions.
But whether the city is able to draw a population in the long term will depend on the vitality of its industries and local economy; it is still too early to predict a future population scale.
According to statistics from 2015, the population density of Shenzhen was 5,713 people per square kilometer, Shanghai at 3,809 and Beijing 1,323. If Xiongan's population is below 2.5 million, its population density will be 1,250 people per square kilometer, slightly lower than that of Beijing.
But if Xiongan's population soars to 5 million, its population density will almost double that of China's capital. Relieving Beijing's population burden by creating somewhere even more crowded than Beijing itself would be contrary to Xiongan's good intentions. The local government should therefore set strict limits on its own population, researchers say.
Unemployment rate
As Xiongan has positioned itself as a green, smart city of innovation, the CASS report projects that a large number of its future population will be high-end talents who moved there with their companies. Locals, including urban citizens and peasants, will mainly work in the service sector or in jobs which have relatively lower technical requirements.
Another challenge lies in how to deal with the local population working in Xiongan's older industries, which are now undergoing a transformation. In the half-year since it was established, 9,000 small manufacturing businesses in Xiongan that failed to meet environmental requirements have been asked to fold, thereby increasing the local unemployment rate.
