The World (2004)

An American documentarian like Errol Morris would visit this world and find easy humor in its stunted grandiosity. But The World has been made in China by Jia Zhangke, a director who has been in much trouble with the authorities -- not because he embraces the West, but because he mocks modern China for trying to become Western in such haste. He doesn't yearn for the days of Chairman Mao, but he doesn't find the emerging China much of an improvement; the nation seems trapped between two sterilities. [There] is integrity in a movie that refuses to pump up melodrama where none belongs. This is not a movie about an amusement park threatened by a bomb, or populated by colorful characters, or made into the object of satire. It is a movie about people doing boring and badly paid work day after day while being required to look happy.

— Roger Ebert

[In 2020], the only part of Xiong’an open to the public was the ‘Citizen Service Centre’. Attracted by inspiring videos of the city, visitors drove down in great numbers. Volunteers met them in the massive car park and took them on shuttle buses to a miniature version of a city zone that looked like one of the most prosperous commercial districts in Beijing. There were pedestrian pathways and attractive little gardens between the high-end housing blocks. The office buildings displayed the signs of the well-known enterprises and government departments that were due to move in. There were restaurants, a McDonald’s, a Starbucks, an unmanned convenience store and a semi-automated rubbish bin. Volunteers in green jackets showed the tourists how to use it: put an empty water bottle into a hole, wait a second, and a small souvenir, a key ring or a wristband, pops out of a slot as your reward for protecting the environment. The centre isn’t big and the tour didn’t last long. Visitors, returning by shuttle bus to their cars, felt they were leaving a new sort of theme park – a political one.

— Long Ling (The London Review of Books)