Shanghai

Shanghai is reclaiming the title of China's global city. Shanghai has more foreign residents, more foreign companies, more international restaurants, and generally a more cosmopolitan atmosphere than any other mainland Chinese city. Although working-class international migrants are still few in number compared to cities such as New York or even Hong Kong, international business and managerial migrants residing in Shanghai number over 200,000. For example, by 2008, Shanghai had passed New York and Los Angeles as the city with the most Japanese residents outside of Japan (over 40,000). Nearly 5% of Taiwan's 20 million citizens are said to be living now in the Shanghai region. The Shanghai region remains a manufacturing and service center. In 2007, Shanghai's port processed US$54 billion in exports, and the city saw over US$8 billion in direct foreign investment. [Page 1526]Shanghai also hosted the World Expo in 2010, which, after the Beijing Olympics, is counted as the second watershed event for China's coming out as a global power. Physically the city is impressive, with numerous Art Deco masterpieces surviving from a building boom in the 1920s and, beginning in 1990, a continuous wave of vertical construction that has given Shanghai more skyscrapers than the entire West Coast of the United States.

Shanghai's chief rival as China's global city is Hong Kong. Sociologist Saskia Sassen has argued that Hong Kong is more the equivalent of New York, a true world city with transnational connections in finance and services, whereas Shanghai functions more like Chicago, a city devoted to serving a huge industrial hinterland. Although Shanghai is still surpassed by Hong Kong by objective measures such as financial transactions, international flights, and per capita gross domestic product, Sassen, in her argument, ignores Shanghai's cultural role as China's 20th-century “shock city,” a city whose centrality to the image of Chinese modernity is more analogous to New York than to Chicago. Indeed, Hong Kong is seen by many Chinese as a transplanted version of Shanghai that only emerged in 1949 with the flight of Shanghai capitalists to the British enclave. As Gerald Suttles suggests, the stature of a city is not won or lost easily and is as tied to its cultural reputation as it is to economic and financial infrastructure. Shanghai retains the stature of China's global city in the minds of many Chinese, perhaps more so than Hong Kong.

Shanghai's recent reemergence has been described as its “second coming” as a global city. Shanghai was one of the first treaty ports opened to Western settlement and capital after the Opium War in 1841. Benefiting from the civil wars and political vicissitudes of the next century, Shanghai was the crucible of almost every feature of China's emerging modern civilization, including China's first department stores, cinemas, dance halls, and other forms of modern popular culture. On the eve of the declaration of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Shanghai boasted nearly 4 million residents, four times as many as the new capital city, Beijing. After declining in importance during the decades of Maoist planned economy from the 1950s to the 1980s, Shanghai was reopened to foreign investment in the early 1990s as a way of creating a new “dragon's head” at the mouth of the Yangtze River. One reason for this renewed focus on Shanghai by the Chinese Communist Party was the concern that the center of China's economic developments had shifted too greatly to a far South dominated culturally by Hong Kong, a city whose political loyalties still could not be counted on even after the return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Encouraging Shanghai to resume its role as China's international center was a political strategy to ensure control over capital markets. Economically, the two cities remain intimately connected, with Hong Kong capital dominating Shanghai's office and retail developments. Indeed, the rivalry between the cities is as intimate as it is heated, with most Hong Kong capitalists betting on both sides.

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