Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade

While Shanghai surely appears toward the top of any list of the world's leading cities and is the most populous city of the most populous country on Earth, its top-of-mind awareness doesn't come so much from hard-number achievements like per capita GDP – at roughly US$20,000 per year, Shanghai's per capita GDP rivals that of Hungary, but trails by a fair margin that of any EU capital city. Rather, Shanghai's stature derives in part from its mythic history – by turns the "Paris of the East" or "Whore of the Orient" during the first few decades of the last century – and since the mid 1990s from its position as the leading face of China's globalization and the most international city (again) in the country.