New York City on the Mississippi River

China is so large that I'm going to say it has two New Yorks. I'm going to call Shanghai "New York City #1" and Hong Kong "New York City #2." I'm not going to call either city a Los Angeles or a Chicago because as financial capitals, they more closely resemble New York. And if you're wondering why I'm posting about a city in my series about China's provinces, Shanghai is a province. There are four provincial-level cities in China: Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing, and Chongqing.

New York City and Shanghai are the largest cities in their respective megastates. Eighteen million people live in New York's urban area (pictured below) and 18.9 million people live in Shanghai municipality (pictured above). I'm comparing New York's urban area to the city limits of Shanghai because they're similar in size. If you expand both cities to include their metro areas, New York has the larger population, but it's three times larger in size (the New York metro area includes cities as far away as Trenton, NJ and New Haven, CT). So Shanghai is the larger city, and it's growing much faster than New York: from 1990 to 2000 Shanghai's population grew by 25.5% and New York's by 9.3%.

The city is centered on the Huangpu River, which flows north into the Yangtze. The picture below, used on the cover of every book about China's Rise, is of Pudong (浦东), or "East of the Huangpu." It was an undeveloped part of the city until 1990, when it was turned into a Special Economic Zone (SEZ). These zones, established all over China, were an effort to encourage foreign direct investment by creating a very different business atmosphere than existed in the rest of China. Foreign companies got tax breaks, greater freedom in international trade, and other perks. The Shanghai Stock Exchange is in Pudong, as are some of the tallest buildings in China. In the photo below, you can see the Oriental Pearl TV Tower on the left, and the two tallest buildings on the right are the Shanghai World Financial Center and the Jin Mao Building. The Park Hyatt Shanghai is in the building that looks like a giant bottle opener, and you can stay there next weekend for $322.13 a night (I just checked online). Or you could get a room at Aria in Las Vegas for only $199 (and if you do, $0.0000852317 of that is mine). The Shanghai Tower is currently under construction and when completed it'll be the tallest building in China (and 43% taller than the tallest skyscraper in the US). While the US invented the skyscraper and had all of the tallest buildings in the world until 2003, we should take some comfort from the fact that American architectural firms will have designed the four tallest buildings in China after the completion of the Shanghai Tower.

Shanghai is competing with Hong Kong to become China's financial and trade center. Thanks to its proximity to the Yangtze and the ocean, it's the busiest port in the world (by cargo tonnage). In another way, Shanghai is sort of like New Orleans. Shanghai is at the mouth of the largest river in Asia, like New Orleans is at the mouth of the Mississippi. The Port of South Louisiana (between New Orleans and Baton Rouge) is the busiest in the US (by tonnage), but it handles a third of the cargo that Shanghai does. America's busiest container port is in Los Angeles, but Shanghai does four times the container traffic too.

New York and Shanghai are both cities of the future. Their presents and their futures overshadow their pasts. However, as China is still a developing nation ("third world" is so passé), with half of its population in rural poverty, Shanghai's future burns a bit more brightly. Shanghai is already larger than New York and average incomes in Pudong are 16 times higher than in the rest of China. It's already a world capital and it's growing at 3 times the rate New York is! Shanghai's future is tied to China's, and I am optimistic about both.