Xiong’an is not an aberration in contemporary Chinese governance; it is part of a pattern. The same logic that hollowed out this “millennium city” has long been tested, refined, and imposed on the Tibetan plateau. What links the silent boulevards of Xiong’an to the emptied grasslands of Tibet is not geography, economics, or culture, but power specifically the governing instinct of Xi Jinping, which treats people as variables to be repositioned, not as communities rooted in place.
Under Xi, space is something to be engineered, corrected, and disciplined. In Xiong’an, this impulse manifests as forced institutional relocation, frozen property markets, and administrative migration designed to manufacture a city where none organically wished to form. In Tibet, the same impulse appears far more brutally. Nomadic communities, whose livelihoods have been tied to the land for centuries, have been uprooted en masse under the language of “ecological protection”, “poverty alleviation”, and “modernisation”. In both cases, the vocabulary is benevolent, technocratic, and moralised. In both cases, the outcome is displacement without consent.
Tibetan nomads were not consulted about abandoning their pastures any more than Beijing residents were meaningfully consulted about relocating to Xiong’an. The decision was made elsewhere, by planners and officials who believe that stability, legibility, and control outweigh lived knowledge. Grasslands were fenced, herds reduced, movements restricted, and families pushed into concrete settlements where dependency replaced autonomy. The state insisted this was progress. The people experienced it as loss.
Xiong’an follows the same script, merely applied to a different social class. Instead of herders, it is civil servants, academics, and SOE employees. Instead of grasslands, it is social capital. Instead of yaks, it is access to elite education, healthcare, and networks. What is being severed is not tradition, but choice. The message is identical: your relationship to place is conditional; the state’s vision overrides your own.
In Tibet, the consequences have been cultural erosion, psychological dislocation, and economic fragility. Communities that once sustained themselves through mobile pastoralism now rely on subsidies, surveillance, and seasonal labour. The land is “protected”, but the people are hollowed out. Xiong’an risks a bureaucratic version of the same fate a city sustained by orders and budgets rather than by attachment, initiative, or belief. It exists because it must, not because it is wanted.
This parallel exposes the deeper truth about Xi’s governance. He does not trust organic systems, whether cultural or urban. He distrusts spontaneity, mobility, and inherited ways of living. Nomads roaming freely and citizens choosing where to live both represent uncertainty. And uncertainty, in Xi’s China, is treated as a threat. The solution is always the same: fix people in place, redesign their environment, and declare the outcome inevitable.
Yet history shows that forced settlement rarely produces vitality. In Tibet, relocated nomads have not become prosperous modern citizens; they have become managed populations. In Xiong’an, relocated institutions have not created a living city; they have created an administrative shell. Both are landscapes shaped for visibility and control rather than for human flourishing.
What unites these projects is a profound misunderstanding of how societies endure. Cities, like cultures, cannot be manufactured by decree. They grow from habit, memory, necessity, and choice. When those are stripped away, what remains may look orderly on a planning document, but it is brittle in reality.
Xiong’an’s emptiness and Tibet’s emptied grasslands are not separate stories. They are chapters of the same doctrine one that believes the state knows best where people should live, how they should move, and what they should become. It is a doctrine that builds quickly, relocates ruthlessly, and listens last.
