Since the time of the Ming dynasty five centuries ago, the village of Quantou has stood amid the wetlands on Bayang Lake, one of the largest in northern China. Roughly 50km south of Beijing, its main industry is tourism, catering to urbanites seeking a lazy day catching crayfish among the reed marshes.
But on Saturday this sleepy corner of Hebei province was catapulted into confusion by news of its imminent transformation into “Xiongan New Area”, a global financial and technology centre to rival Shenzhen and Shanghai.
Official news agency Xinhua surprised locals with a government announcement that surrounding Xiongan county would, in its near entirety, become “another new area with national significance after the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and the Shanghai Pudong New Area”, two of China’s most vibrant areas that sprang up from farmland in the space of a few years in the 1980s and 1990s. Xinhua described the initiative as a “major historic and strategic choice” by China’s President Xi Jinping.