Running on vast amounts of real-time data,
traveling through high-speed networks,
the cities of the future will be technologically smart.
The companies designing these smart systems say
they'll make our urban environments more livable,
they'll keep traffic flowing,
save energy and even help keep us safe.
Countries all across the world are embracing smart cities,
but none more so than China.
This is China's newest and most exquisite blueprint
in the new era
that presents the image of a confident, beautiful
and innovative China.
This is a concept favored by Xi Jinping himself,
the notion of smart cities to smart society
and that has become
a sort of, like for me, a national strategy.
To sustain its already high levels of productivity,
Beijing has pumped an estimated $800 billion
into high-speed rail, autonomous vehicles,
smart grids and 5G networks
and is piloting more than half the world's smart cities.
But for many, the trade-offs are alarming.
High-tech surveillance is already widespread
for Chinese citizens
and it's a growing concern for countries
who import these systems from Chinese tech firms.
China's exporting elements of its surveillance complex
to third countries
through the export of what they call smart cities.
By 2030, China is set to overtake the U.S.
and become the world's number one economy
and it's betting that smart cities
will be a key part of that success.
The story of China's urbanization
is one without historic parallel.
Every year 20 new cities are built from scratch in China.
More people now live in China's cities and towns
than live in its countryside.
The economic reforms of the 1970s
drove hundreds of millions of people out of rural poverty
and into China's cities in search of work.
Many would end up in the factories
that powered the nation's meteoric economic rise.
That's more than 10% of the world's population
living in Chinese cities.
Such is the pace of development
it can be hard to get your head around the numbers.
China has over 100 cities each with their own population
of over a million people.
Despite this, China's urbanization rate,
the percentage of people in cities, is still some way behind
other advanced economies, like the U.S. and Japan.
But by 2050, urbanization is expected to hit 80%
and it's all part of Beijing's plans.
That's where smart cities come into it.
A new smarter urbanization had already been designated
a national priority
in the National New Type Urbanization Plan in 2014.
As well as encouraging permanent migration to cities,
that plan called for high-speed rail links
and other infrastructure.
But to sustain these urban populations,
the cities also have to be digitally advanced.
In the Communist Party's latest five-year plan,
five interconnected city clusters will be rolled out
by the mid-2030s.
Beijing contends they'll be world leaders
in smart city infrastructure.
Each will also be home to as many as 100 million people.
Xiongan is designed to relieve Beijing
of functions not essential to its role as the capital
and provide a Chinese solution to urban problems.
This smart city strategy fits into
the economic transformation
or the qualitative upgrade of its economy very well
because smart city ticks all the boxes;
innovation, technology, new economy
and economic upgrade.
It's a sort of like new urban utopia
or a new urban imaginary
that gives the policymakers in China
some aspirations and some inspirations as well.
In the Pearl River Delta cluster in the south
is one of the most advanced cities, Shenzhen.
China's answer to Silicon Valley used to be a fishing town
40 years ago.
As its population grew 40-fold,
GDP grew 11,452-fold.
When I entered China in January, 2015,
the city of Shenzhen, if I'm correct,
had around 13-point-some million people
living and working.
Right now, if we look at the amount of people
living and working there now,
it is close to I think, 18 or 19, maybe even 20 million.
Headquartered in Shenzhen,
Huawei is China's biggest tech firm.
When it comes to intelligent cities and connected cities,
we have supported the majority of the world
with global and mobile broadband infrastructures.
All these digitized technologies are helping this industry
to also move higher up the value chain
in a much shorter timeframe.
In 2020, Shenzhen deployed next generation 5G
and high-speed broadband.
Huawei, the market leader, played a major role.
Huawei has completed a series of 5G new radio tests.
The downlink peak throughput has reached
over six gigabytes per second for a single user.
In Shenzhen, average broadband speeds
are about one gigabyte per second.
That's given local companies an edge
when it comes to productivity.
The timing of smart traffic lights
are adjusted to improve flow efficiently.
Surveillance camera systems capture traffic violations.
It sits within a horizontal layer
of mobile and broadband and fixed technologies
to connect it all.
That's what makes it intelligent.
It understands what it is for.
It optimizes and it utilizes
all these broadband connectivities for applications
for people to stay at home
and whilst at home using applications from the government,
for example, to do this citizen or residency registration,
or transfer from one city to another city.
The same for taxation, the same for utilities,
gas, water, electricity and what have you.
No more need to go to city hall,
which is downtown city center, for paperwork
and what have you.
In the process of all of this, in return,
it lowers the burden on traffic, of course,
because these millions of people
in five, six years timeframe
added to the population of Shenzhen in itself
would also burden traffic in a tremendous way.
But of course,
these smart cities are imprinted with the characteristics
of China's surveillance state.
The Chinese people are being watched
in ways that earlier generations were not.
I think there's a pretty crucial distinction to make
in privacy in terms of protection of one's personal data
against companies misusing it
and privacy in the sense of an intrinsic civil liberty
to protect against overly excessive government interference
into one's personal life,
Privacy, in the first sense,
there are actually very robust discussions in China.
There are personal information protection laws
being drafted, data security laws being drafted
that are meant to protect privacy
from company intrusion.
As for the privacy in the second sense,
there's very little discussion,
very little protection from government intrusion
upon one's personal privacy.
If companies are collecting less data
and are being more secure
with how they manage your personal data
and your personal information,
that might also limit the ability of the government
to get data from companies.
Regarding Chinese citizens' reactions
to AI intruding upon their personal lives,
there's a lot more discussion in Chinese social media,
Chinese blogs, than we would assume in the West.
Inside China, local governments
now have a more effective way to monitor citizens
on a real-time basis.
Under China's Cyber Security Law,
companies must store users' data on local servers
and decrypt the data on request from the authorities.
A new data security law
which just passed on June 11th
is something that Chinese government really cared about
and no one is going to get past it.
Others worry that Chinese companies
may share sensitive information picked up abroad
with Chinese intelligence services.
Huawei has famously been accused of being dangerous
because countries like the U.S.
think it could use its telecom equipment
to spy for the Chinese government.
Huawei denies the allegations,
arguing that U.S. restrictions aren't about cybersecurity
but are really designed to safeguard American dominance
of global tech.
China's ambassador to the U.K. tells the BBC
that Britain's decision to drop Huawei from its 5G network
is a bad move for the country.
I think the U.K. should have
its own independent foreign policy
rather than to dance to the tune of Americans.
Despite the international scrutiny,
there still seems to be a demand
for China's smart city model.
Chinese vendors have won contracts
for smart city infrastructure in about 50 cities worldwide
according to a study by RWR Advisory.
Most are in illiberal societies.
Whether such privacy fears are overstated or not,
the opportunities are too great
for China big tech to ignore.
Chinese CEOs lined up to pledge their support
for President Xi Jinping's
recent "common prosperity" policy
despite the hit their businesses would take
as part of his crackdown on various industries.
The regulation of the technology giants
and to what extent our behavior, our action,
even our travel patterns, our shopping and preferences,
they are being utilized for commercial purposes
and again, this is a global issue and a global concern.
They're huge market opportunities.
So they work together to promote what I call
the smart city movement in China.
But Beijing's dreams of utopian living
could come crashing down.
The very urbanization that's led to smart cities
also resulted in vast ghost towns
as the pace of building was too fast
for newcomers moving in.
For the developers,
kick-starting these projects means taking on huge debt.
So when buildings aren't filled quickly enough,
that can mean companies going bust.
Chinese authorities are now grappling
with how to handle developers like Evergrande Group,
which now account for
almost half the world's distressed debt.
If China's economy takes a hit
while its property developers go bust,
smart cities suddenly become a lot harder to build.
Despite its Orwellian overtones,
this convergence between the state and private tech firms
to create smart city technology clearly has major benefits.
Smart city apps helped China contain the spread
of the Covid-19 virus,
allowing Beijing to turn its economy
from contraction to growth faster than any other nation
and smart city ambassadors like Edwin Diender at Huawei
see their technologies as essential to our future.
It creates more insights
in terms of how and where is this city, for example,
consuming electricity, consuming power
and only with digital
we're able to create a visualization for that,
create a better understanding for that,
but most importantly,
have a principle of big data analytics
to help us understand and create insights
in how to anticipate.
But I think the most important one
and the one that is the most sustainable,
of course sits with energy transition.
I truly believe energy transition
is the next wave of innovation for digital transformation.
The real question is whether smart cities will be designed
for the people who live in them
or for the governments and tech firms who run them?
I strongly believe that a smart city,
even though it's built upon technology,
but it should not be technology-centric.
It's about the livability, sustainability
and the public good and the social inclusion.
Our cities will thrive in the future
by building and upgrading infrastructure with technologies
that tackle the biggest challenges
of a rapidly urbanizing world.
China aims to be a leader in this field,
both at home and abroad.
One thing is for sure,
China's urban landscape will be dramatically refashioned
in the decades ahead.