China Travel Forum

[Amymou]

Although it has loomed large as a city for barely a century and half - an eyeblink in the grand sweep of Chinese antiquity - there are few cities that have had Shanghai's impact on the imagination of the world or on the story of modern China. Moreover, any scenario for China's economic future will place Shanghai at its center. An undistinguished, though economically important port in the 19th century, Shanghai was divided up among the colonial powers at the end of the Opium Wars. After that, fed by the foreign commerce that has been its lifeblood, Shanghai quickly grew into a vibrant port city with an ambiguous reputation, fabulously rich and yet a magnet for the poor and dispossessed, a commercial center where no-one asked too many questions about where the money was coming from. In the first half of the 20th century, it was a cultural melting pot and also an intellectual crucible where some of the most important events of China's communist history took place. After the formation of the People's Republic of China, the city stagnated until the opening up of the Chinese economy in the 1980s, when Shanghai exploded into the largest city in China with gigantic economic clout - witness its 2006 GDP of RMB 1.03 trillion.

With Jiangsu Province to the northwest and Zhejiang Province to the southwest, Shanghai is the largest industrial and commercial city in China today. The cultural and commercial hub of East Asia, it is set to step into a much brighter spotlight in 2010, when the eyes of the world will turn there for the Shanghai World Expo.
Situated on the banks of the Yangtze River Delta, Shanghai has become the world's biggest and busiest cargo port. The Huangpu River divides the city into two parts - Pudong New District (on the east bank) and Puxi (on the west bank).
For more information about Shanghai, please go to echinacities.com.