Bandung

In the last days of March, I was in China’s new city of Xiong’an, less than a two-hour drive from Beijing. The city is being built to relieve congestion in the capital, but it will also be home to women and men who are eager to develop China’s new quality productive forces and will be the centre of universities, hospitals, research institutes, and innovative technology companies, including high-tech farming. Xiong’an has the ambition of reaching ‘net-zero’ carbon dioxide emissions while using big data to harness social science to improve the quality of people’s everyday lives. The city is built amidst a massive web of lakes, rivers, and canals, with Lake Baiyangdian at its heart. On a chilly afternoon, a group of us – including Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research team members Tings Chak, Jie Xiong, Jojo Hu, Grace Cao, and Atul Chandra – took a boat across the lake to visit a museum dedicated to the fight against Japanese imperialism.