The morning sunlight slips into a 70-square-meter apartment in the Xiong'an New Area and Liu Suying's cat stirs first. It presses its head against Liu's hand until she wakes on a spring morning in March.

Liu then gets up. She makes breakfast quickly — eggs sizzling in a pan, the smell of coffee drifting through her small kitchen. Without hesitation, she leaves her home in the new area's Xiongdong district in Hebei province. About seven minutes later, she arrives at work by car.

Liu, 25, graduated from Beijing Jiaotong University last June and now works as a production planning engineer at a commercial satellite company in Xiong'an. She is satisfied with her job, which involves innovative work, and the ease of life in the new area.

She rents a two-bedroom apartment for 10,000 yuan ($1,450) a year, and receives a monthly living subsidy of 1,000 yuan from the local government.

"A friend of mine works at a big tech company in Beijing," Liu said. "She rents a single room in a shared apartment for about 3,000 yuan a month. When she heard I have my own place, she was jealous."

Nine years ago, such a scene was unimaginable. In April 2017, when China announced the establishment of Xiong'an New Area, the planned construction zone was mostly fields and villages.

Today, what has risen from that ground is a city designed not just to relieve Beijing of its nonessential functions — a major mission for the new city — but to become a place people from different walks of life want to reside in.

By the end of 2025, Xiong'an's permanent population reached about 1.4 million, up about 200,000 from five years ago, according to local authorities.

So far, a total of more than 400 branches of central State-owned enterprises have established a presence in the area, bringing their employees and attracting even more talented people.