Welcome to Xiongan, the ‘City of the Future,’ where the collective human soul goes to be digitized, filed, and forgotten under three layers of pristine concrete. While the West continues its slow-motion collapse into a landscape of crumbling bridges and partisan bickering over which billionaire gets to gut the tax code next, Chairman Xi has decided to build a monument to the only thing more terrifying than chaos: absolute, unblinking order. Xiongan is not just a city; it is a three-dimensional manifestation of a spreadsheet, a top-down urban fantasy designed to prove that if you throw enough state capital at a swamp, you can eventually build a playground for the world’s most obedient algorithms.

The project is billed as a relief valve for Beijing’s ‘non-capital functions,’ a euphemism so dry it could cause a brushfire. In reality, it is the ultimate vanity project for a man who views history as something to be edited in real-time. The plan features three ‘cities’ stacked like a dystopian layer cake: a surface city of parks and high-tech offices, an underground city for logistics and transit, and a digital city that monitors every heartbeat and data packet. It’s a marvel of engineering, assuming your idea of a marvel is a place where even the trees probably have IP addresses and the birds are likely reporting your walking speed to a central server. This is the logical conclusion of the 21st century: a place where the messy, inconvenient reality of human existence is smoothed over by 5G connectivity and a relentless aesthetic of ‘green’ authoritarianism.

Of course, the Western ‘Right’ will decry this as a communist nightmare, their voices cracking with irony as they ignore the fact that their own cities are effectively open-air museums of late-stage neglect. They fear the surveillance state of the East while voluntarily carrying its precursors in their pockets, happily trading their privacy for a 15% discount on a subscription they don’t need. Meanwhile, the performative ‘Left’ will look at Xiongan’s sprawling parks and carbon-neutral ambitions and swoon, conveniently ignoring the fact that this ecological paradise was willed into existence by a regime that views dissent as a software bug to be patched out. It is the perfect Rorschach test for our collective stupidity: one side sees a red menace, the other sees a green utopia, and neither realizes that both visions lead to the same soul-crushing loss of agency.

Let us analyze the sheer hubris of the ‘Three Cities’ concept. The underground layer is designed to handle all logistics, meaning you’ll never see a delivery truck or a trash can. It’s a sterile, sanitized dream where the machinery of life is hidden away so the ‘smart’ citizens on the surface can pretend they aren’t dependent on a massive, invisible proletariat of automated systems. It is the architectural equivalent of a person who hides their psychological trauma under a layer of expensive Botox and a LinkedIn profile that says they are ‘passionate about synergy.’ By hiding the guts of the city, Xi has created a stage set for a play that nobody actually knows how to act in. Current reports suggest the city remains largely empty—a ‘ghost city’ waiting for the spirits of bureaucrats to be forcibly relocated. It is a testament to the idea that you can build the hardware of the future, but you can’t force the software of human life to run on it without a bayonet at its back.

The ‘Digital Twin’ of Xiongan is perhaps the most honest part of the whole endeavor. For every physical building, there is a digital replica that tracks everything in real-time. In the West, we call this ‘invasive data harvesting’ when a tech giant does it to sell us cat food; in Xiongan, it’s just called ‘governance.’ This is the future of the species: a total convergence of the physical and the virtual where ‘privacy’ is an archaic term found only in dusty dictionaries. We are moving toward a world where your value as a human is determined by your ability to fit into the parameters of a city’s operating system. If you aren’t ‘smart’ enough, or ‘green’ enough, or ‘compliant’ enough, the city simply won't work for you. The turnstiles won't open, the lights won't turn on, and the ‘future’ will leave you behind in the swamp where the project started.

In the end, Xiongan is exactly what we deserve. We have spent decades trading our autonomy for convenience and our culture for consumption. Whether it’s the slow, entropic rot of the American rust belt or the high-gloss digital tyranny of the Chinese New Area, the destination is the same. We are building prisons and calling them progress. Xi Jinping’s ‘City of the Future’ is merely the first one to admit that the humans are the least important part of the design. It is impressive, it is worrying, and above all, it is the final, boring punctuation mark on the story of human freedom. Enjoy the parks; the cameras have a lovely view of your submission.