Making a new area in Xiong'an: Incentives and challenges of China's “Millennium Plan”

On April 1, 2017, China announced to initiate the Xiong'an New Area (XNA) plan, which is a national-level strategy aimed at alleviating the pressures felt by Beijing and promoting the integration of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) city-region. In China, a city-region can be viewed as an outcome of state spatial selectivity that aims to manage crises and maintain governance through strong state involvement. This paper attempts to provide a broad view of the XNA plan by examining it in the context of China's long-term efforts to coordinate the BTH region, explaining the incentives associated with choosing Xiong'an, and analyzing the challenges the plan has faced. Considering that theoretical insights based on Western experience may not be applicable to China, this paper can contribute to the debate revealing the logics of city-region building in different contexts.