It's been protected from floodwaters that destroy tens of thousands of homes.

And it costs tens of billions of dollars to build.

Welcome to Xiongan, the mega-project that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has staked his legacy on.

Located 60 miles outside Beijing, Xiongan is designed to ease pressure on the overcrowded and congested Chinese capital of more than 20 million people.

Seven years ago, all of this was cornfields and swamp.

Today, it is a metropolis being built from scratch.

With a whopping price tag of $93 billion, it was built as a showcase for China's technological prowess and as a way to show off its urban progress to the world.

In less than a decade, thousands of buildings have sprung up, including residential compounds, office complexes, luxury hotels, and one of the symbols of the city, Xiongan train station.

This terminus is one of China's biggest, the size of 88 football fields.

It can take more than 100,000 passengers a day.

But right now, it is just a deathly silence.

You just don't see a lot of people around.

You can hear a couple of cleaning workers, a couple of people off in the distance, some security guards.

But other than that, it is pretty quiet here.

Despite its official completion date of 2035, parts of the city are already finished.

The scale and the speed of the construction here is really just astonishing.

You can just feel being here that no expense has been spared to build this into what they're hoping is going to be a socialist modern metropolis.

Across the city, signs and billboards promote quotes from China's most powerful leader in decades.

Basically what it says is that everyone should persist without giving up in using Xi Jinping's thoughts on socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era to unite our hearts and forge our spirits.

Something along those lines.

And the success of this multi-billion dollar endeavor is directly linked to Xi's personal investment in it.

So much so that when the deadly floods of 2023 swamped nearby areas, officials demanded Xiongan be protected.

As floodwaters were diverted from sparsely populated Xiongan into what the government called designated flood zones, neighboring cities and villages were submerged.

Videos on social media showed people taking to the streets in a rare show of public anger, claiming the floods in their areas were caused by diverted waters, not by heavy rainfall.

The Communist Party hopes Xiongan will stand alongside successes like the technological hub of Shenzhen, in the south of the country, a city which has come to symbolize China's transformation beginning in the 1980s under former leader Deng Xiaoping.

But unlike Shenzhen's disorderly and sprawling growth, the new city of Xiongan is meticulously planned, with limits on which companies are welcome here, including the tech and space sectors which are actively encouraged to move into Xiongan.

The city also has strict controls on home prices in a bid to fend off speculators.

But despite the arrival of state-run companies and institutions, people appear to be less interested in setting up home here.

State media boasts that 1.2 million people live here, a figure boosted by incorporating surrounding counties into the city's domain, according to experts in urban planning.

But the newly built areas looked eerily empty when we visited.

Now we're in sort of a residential commercial part of Xiongan.

This is actually quite a green city.

Unlike Beijing, it's lower density.

There's a cap on how tall the buildings can be so there aren't big skyscrapers around.

But there's also not a lot of people around.

It's very quiet here.

In fact, while local authorities say 120,000 people have moved into these new homes over the past seven years, many of them aren't newcomers, but locals from the villages flattened to make way for the city.

At least two of the people we spoke to were quite forthright about some of the inequalities and some of the anger that some of the local residents had here.

You had a lot of local villagers who basically had their villages torn down and were given compensation, a compensation that I think in a lot of cases didn't quite meet expectations.

There are some newcomers, but many of them appear to work for the companies actually building the city, with construction remaining the main source of employment in the area.

Experts point out that it took over a decade for the city of Shenzhen to be considered a successful venture.

But while Shenzhen grew as China opened to a deluge of Western investment, Xiongan is being built as China faces the headwinds of decoupling from the West, an economic slowdown, and declining population growth.

Despite these concerns, authorities project that Xiongan's population will reach 5 million people in the coming decades.

China experts say that Xi has invested so much of his reputation into Xiongan, he has little choice but to push on with the megaproject.

But whether this still largely empty construction site evolves into a shining metropolis of the socialist future, or a failed vanity project, remains to be seen.