Such dramatic rhetoric signalled an unusual and historic move in state politics.<\/p>\n
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What is this Xiong\u2019an New Area? How will it promote China\u2019s future over the next thousand years? And why did the state make this strategic move? As China and the world scrambled for answers, I found myself thinking: How ironic history is! <\/em><\/p>\n Xiong\u2019an is the same region explored in my book. A thousand years ago, the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) ordered that water be channelled into the region so that it could function as a military defence zone. Doing so produced floods that drowned farms, displaced residents, and created a series of ponds, ditches, and swamps. The large-scale environmental transformation, designed and performed by the state for its political and military purposes, led to environmental degradation, poverty, and human suffering during the following ten centuries.<\/p>\n Prior to April 1, 2017, Xiong\u2019an was one of the poorest and most forgotten regions in the country. Its young residents generally leave the waterlogged area for a better life.<\/p>\n Now, after being neglected for a millennium, Xiong\u2019an has been designated a hub of the future. Located a hundred kilometres south of Beijing, it will serve as a core region to ease pressure on the growing capital, performing its various economic, cultural, and societal functions.<\/p>\n The Cinderella of China\u2019s geo-economic hierarchy, Xiong\u2019an is now promised royal treatment. Its unwanted water will be drained; its sinking land restored. Skyscrapers and highways will be built, and high-tech companies will compete for space. Both blue-collar and highly educated workers will stream in. Granted unprecedented policy support and financial subsidies, the region will become China\u2019s new megacity, we are told. As the government envisages it, Xiong\u2019an will be green, energy saving, and ecologically sustainable, serving as a model for the \u201cecological civilisation\u201d that the Chinese government champions to build for the twenty first century.<\/p>\n At first glance the damaged old Xiong\u2019an and the promising new Xiong\u2019an seem to have nothing in common.<\/p>\n Yet, juxtaposing the region\u2019s past and future, I see more commonality than difference in the ways Xiong\u2019an has been treated.<\/p>\n Under the banner of the greater good, in both instances, the state demands sacrifice by a locale, region, or human community. Displacement and environmental damage have been justified as an unfortunate means for attaining wider stability and prosperity.<\/p>\n State logic that a thousand years ago turned the farmland in Xiong\u2019an into waterlogged swamps, today, aims to transform its swamps into an urban wonderland.<\/p>\n A thousand years ago, the Northern Song dynasty took Xiong\u2019an as its northern frontier against the nomads, the Khitan.<\/p>\n To produce an artificial \u201cnatural\u201d barrier, the state sponsored hydraulic projects to excavate farmland, store excessive water, and cause floods. It created a \u201cWatery Great Wall\u201d, which was, \u201cnot deep enough for boats to float on, and not shallow enough for people to walk through.\u201d<\/p>\n Military troops enforced hydraulic regulations that minimised locals\u2019 access to water and land. Private needs gave way to state interests. As the traditional, self-sufficient agriculture collapsed, farmers resorted to foraging. A local civil official, forced to live on lotus roots gathered from the ponds and lakes, complained that his \u201cmouth spits out lotus flowers.\u201d<\/p>\n During the same period, China\u2019s second largest river, the Yellow River, frequently flooded south, where the state\u2019s capital was located. To guard its core interests, the state spent several decades building a hydraulic system to force the river northward, thereby relocating the disaster zone to the already impoverished frontier region.<\/p>\n As millions of tonnes of water and sandy silt crashed into the northern frontier, the ponds and swamps swelled. The Watery Great Wall stretched nearly five hundred kilometres. This drastic transformation of the physical environment remade the landscape, and left behind a legacy of soil salinization, water toxicity and poverty. As a statesman at the turn of the twelfth century observed, the state designed zone showed, \u201calmost no sign of human habitation.\u201d<\/p>\n Forward to 2017. Immediately after the announcement of the Xiong\u2019an New Area, real estate investors flooded into the region. Within days, local housing prices doubled or tripled. As the government hastened to control housing speculation, Xiong\u2019an\u2019s own sons and daughters who had left the region struggled to return and place their claim on local property. Leading universities, hospitals, non-governmental institutions, and companies competed with each other to sign \u201ccollaboration\u201d agreements and land leases with local offices.<\/p>\n Amidst all this, environmentalists have tried, mostly in vain, to voice concern about matters like wetlands, waste treatment and resources.<\/p>\n Knowing what happened to Xiong\u2019an a thousand years ago, I wonder how its modern transformation will play out. For the megacity to emerge, who will have to make sacrifices and bear the costs? What kind of future will China produce for Xiong\u2019an and itself over the next thousand years?<\/p>\nOne locale, two histories<\/h2>\n
History repeating<\/h2>\n
Frontier ponds in the Northern Song Period<\/h2>\n
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\nSource: Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048-1128<\/em> (Cambridge University Press, 2016)<\/span><\/p>\n