A new area of experiments and hopes

Use advantage in agriculture

Xiongan should capitalize on the advantage the area enjoys in agriculture. Xiongan new Area will eventually cover the whole of Baiyangdian, one of the largest freshwater wetlands in North China, which has more than 140 lakes covering 360 square kilometers. And Anxin county, which is home to 85 percent of the wetlands, is the largest base for fishery products in northern China. With a population of 390,000, Anxin county has a GDP of more than 4 billion yuan ($580 million).

Given these objective conditions, Xiongan New Area should maintain its core competitiveness in agriculture, which will be in line with the central government’s call for deepening supply-side structural reform in the agriculture sector. Industry upgrading and exploring diversified patterns of developing agriculture could be a possible direction for the next move — of promoting agricultural tourism and eco-agricultural park while improving the ecology of large areas of freshwater wetlands that might be suffering from pollution.

If more incentive policies are formulated to attract large-scale companies, institutions and universities, which in turn will draw more professional talents, it will boost the sustainability of the local agriculture industry and thus create more jobs prompting migrant workers to return and even start their own businesses.

Liu Ying, research fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China