Dear subscribers,
This week, we are heading to China where *El País* reports on the birth of a megacity through the eyes of five incredulous peasants. Behind the bus window that takes them to the new high-speed train station, they witness the emergence of Xiong’an, a city designed as a satellite city of Beijing, located about a hundred kilometers south of the capital. The plains they have cultivated their entire lives, crossed by rivers and marshes, are now blocked by construction fences and dotted with cranes and skyscrapers that disappear into the distance, as *El País* relates. Xiong’an bears the mark of Xi Jinping.
The Chinese president sees it as the dreamed socialist new city that must *”resist the test of History”*. He dreams of leaving his mark as Deng Xiaoping did in the 1980s with Shenzhen, the country’s first special economic zone founded on a fishing village; or Pudong, the financial district.