Shanghai likes to think of itself as New York to Beijing’s Washington DC. Beijing is the buttoned-down, bureaucratic centre of government, so Shanghaiese tell themselves, while Shanghai is the financial, fashion and cultural hub, as well as the nation’s arbiter of taste.
Foreigners arriving in China for the first time often come away with the very same view. With the gleaming skyscrapers in Pudong and its conveyor belt of new restaurants from all over the world, Shanghai has an air of easy cosmopolitanism that makes Beijing seem the provincial city.
