Xi Jinping's "Cabbage Core" Vision Reshapes Beijing's Future

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) — As roses bloom along Beijing's ancient hutong alleyways in early summer, China's capital is deep into a structural transformation that its top leader has described in strikingly agricultural terms: rebuilding the city from the inside, the way a cabbage grows its densest, most valuable core.

The challenge driving the overhaul is familiar to any major metropolis — population density, traffic gridlock, and air pollution. But the scale of Beijing's response, personally directed by General Secretary Xi Jinping over more than a decade, sets it apart as a case study in top-down megacity management.

The conceptual framework crystallized during Xi's January 2019 inspection tour of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. Explaining the logic of relocating government agencies, universities, and enterprises out of the capital, Xi drew a distinction between two development vectors. The newly established Xiong'an New Area, he said, represents Beijing's outward expansion. The capital itself, meanwhile, must focus on internal restructuring — optimizing its core functions and, in his words, "making the cabbage core itself good."

The relocation of non-capital functions is the operational spine of the strategy. Xi has framed it repeatedly not merely as an administrative reshuffling, but as an opportunity for qualitative upgrading — invoking the ancient hydraulic engineer Da Yu's river-regulation principles to describe the logic of channeling functions away from the center to Hebei province and Tianjin.

Results on the ground are visible. Beijing's urban sub-center has absorbed relocated municipal government bodies, state enterprise headquarters, and universities. Asia's largest underground transit hub has entered phased operation. The former Dongfang chemical plant has been converted into what planners call a "green heart" for the district. New cultural landmarks — an arts center, a library, and the Grand Canal Museum — have become the sub-center's civic anchors.

Land freed up in central Beijing by the outward migration has been redirected toward central government functions, expanded public services, green space, and high-technology industry reserves — a deliberate inversion of the sprawl model that characterized Chinese urban growth for decades.

Xi has described that older model dismissively as spreading "like a pancake in a pan." Beijing has now formally abandoned it, becoming the first Chinese megacity to pursue a strategy of controlled scale reduction paired with quality improvement.

The policy architecture received its most comprehensive expression earlier this year with the publication of the Modern Capital Metropolitan Area Spatial Coordination Plan (2023–2035), jointly developed by Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei — the first urban agglomeration plan in China to be ratified by both the CPC Central Committee and the State Council.

During a pre-Spring Festival inspection of Beijing, Xi reiterated that relocating non-capital functions remains the "key link" in the broader Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei coordination strategy, calling for the simultaneous control of new function inflows and the managed exit of existing ones — ensuring, in his framing, that relocation and quality upgrading reinforce rather than undermine each other.