Guangfucheng, is it really the first Smart City project in China?

Beijing Review published a report recently on Guangfucheng, the claimed “first ‘smart city’ project in China”: 

Imagine the following: texting an order into cellphone on your way home from work, your windows open to let fresh air into your apartment; you can also remotely control your air conditioner, fridge and TV set from anywhere. You can check the news while at dinner by activating your table, which is also a giant screen. You can contact a doctor to discuss your symptoms instead of having to travel across town to a hospital. Doctors from other cities can also contribute to your diagnosis and treatment if needed. 

What may seem like the distant future is becoming a reality in Guangfucheng, a community in Kunming, capital city of China’s southwest Yunnan Province. 

It does sound exciting, but also a bit too good to be true given the timeline (the properties will be handed over to owners this August). I tried to look for more information on this project, but apart from the standard marketing promotional material (including the BJ Review article above which is just a slightly twisted version), very little is available. The project claims IBM and Huawei as technology partners. While there’s no official announcement from IBM China, Huawei does use this project as a case study in its smart city promotional material (translated by me): 

Looking at Huawei’s solution, cloud computing, big data and business intelligence platform are more for business users (Guangfucheng is a mixed-use development including residential, retail and office). Fiber access, WiFi and video surveillance are also quite common in new development in China (for example in Hangzhou city government has required fiber access for all new residential developments). I cannot say this is not a smart city project (it’s definitely smarter than old communities), without further information and knowing IBM’s role in this project. Still it’s hard to believe what the promotional material illustrates is going to become reality any time soon, at least not without the participation of smart home device manufacturers, healthcare providers, education organisations and potentially many other technology companies. 

A quick search on SouFun, a popular Chinese property website shows that quite a few owners are selling their properties in Guangfucheng already, what’s more, none of them mentioned the smart feature of the development. You can also see what the properties actually look like (more pictures can be found in this listing): 

In China properties are sold as Maopei (bare concrete shell as shown in the picture) so it’s even harder to imagine a smart home inhabit inside this shell.