Full story
Haidian’s elite pipeline
In Beijing’s Haidian district, retirees practice tai chi under willows lining a huge lake with an arched bridge decorated with 544 stone lions, while nearby students crowd the halls of Peking University and Tsinghua University.
“decorated with 544 stone lions”
The same neighborhood also hosts thousands of engineers with hoodies and laptops entering the headquarters of tech giants ByteDance and Lenovo, and it sits alongside the Central Party School of the Communist Party, described as a campus hidden behind high walls and almost absolute secrecy.
The El Mundo America profile says the CCP turned Haidian into a talent production chain since the late 1980s, selecting students through the gaokao and sending the most promising to the Central Party School, founded in 1933 and moved to the capital after Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic in 1949.
It adds that the program at the Central Party School includes lessons in economics, public finance, international relations, technological innovation, AI, and crisis management, with the goal of training administrators capable of managing a country with over 1.4 billion inhabitants.
The article also says the campus has become the main vehicle for disseminating President Xi Jinping’s ideology, especially “Xi Jinping Thought on Party Building,” and quotes Zhu Lijia saying, "The ability to govern is the Party's main competitiveness."
AGI Bar in Zhongguancun
In Haidian’s Zhongguancun, ET Enterprise AI describes an AI-themed bar, AGI Bar, opened by Song De last year on Inno Way startup street as a hub for Beijing’s AI developers, investors and students.
The report says the bar is a stone’s throw from Tsinghua and Peking universities and from the offices of well-known Chinese and Western tech firms, including DeepSeek and Microsoft, and it notes the bar has hosted parties for Chinese AI labs including Z.ai.
Song De tells the outlet, "You'll see people sitting around a table coming from different labs, competing companies, and different universities, all chatting about industry trends right here," as customers connect to the bar’s AI agent through WiFi to access free unlimited DeepSeek tokens for coding.
The bar’s signature drink is a 9.9 yuan ($1.50) glass of foam called AGI, and the report says the tokens run on two Nvidia DGX Spark computers on display.
ET Enterprise AI also says Song De is trying to expand the bar’s Beijing floor space this year and use humanoid robots to serve customers drinks, while he says, "The bar is completely losing money."
Ideology and innovation overlap
El Mundo’s second Haidian profile links the Central Party School’s political training to the nearby innovation ecosystem of Zhongguancun, where university laboratories collaborate with private companies, state funds, and government agencies in areas ranging from semiconductors to quantum computing.
“"Political stability is the indispensable condition to sustain China's economic development and international projection,"”
It says the Central Party School is the apex of a network of more than 2,700 centers spread across the country, and it describes the doctrine taught there as addressing how the CPC continues to govern without internal or external fissures.
The article adds that under the current government, the campus has become the main vehicle for spreading the president Xi Jinping’s ideology, especially the so-called “Xi Jinping Thought on the Governance of the Party,” and it quotes Jiang Shigong asserting, "Political stability is the indispensable condition to sustain China's economic development and international projection."
In the same Haidian geography, ET Enterprise AI portrays the bar as part of the AI enthusiasm sweeping across China, with Song De saying, "We say AI is a future public utility like water, electricity, and the internet."
Together, the sources depict Haidian as a place where political training and AI development sit within the same district, with the Central Party School and Zhongguancun’s tech scene described as coexisting in a single ecosystem designed to feed the national project driven by Xi Jinping.