Charts the changing landscape of Shanghai as it embraces modernity

Shanghai is the most modern and dynamic city in China. In preparation for hosting the World Expo 2010, a World's Fair in the grand tradition of international fairs and expositions, the megalopolis embarked on an overhaul to transform itself from the "Pearl of the Orient" into the "City of the Future." Here, the world's tallest buildings soar, the planet's longest bridges span toxic waterways, and the fastest train on earth rockets the city from its storied past toward a future that seems, by turns, either as bright or as hideous as the lights that set the hazy sky aglow each night. At a time when interest in China has seen a sharp increase that shows no signs of abating, Shanghai places China's development and its effects on the world into context by explaining how the country arrived where it is today and why it is building massive infrastructure projects with tremendous social and environmental impact. Shanghai provides an intimate look inside a mega-city heaving with change and offers essential insight into the challenges of remaining human in an increasingly urbanized world.

With the advent of the Internet, and the resulting interconnection within a city and among cities, internet innovation has led to a number of important applications in economic and social fields, helping traditional industries upgrade and organizations gain new core competencies, thereby engendering new business models and new industries. This is what we refer to as the 'Internet Plus'. The 'Internet Plus' action plan was first introduced by Premier Li Keqiang in his Government Work Report at the Third Plenary Session of the 12th National People's Congress on March 5, 2015. This book expounds how 'Internet Plus' plan transforms and influences traditional economy, impacts technological and economic aspects of industries, extends its reach to people's daily lives and creates more profound social implications. In addition, the authors put forward constructive measures and suggestions for Shanghai to promote development of the 'Internet Plus' era and to enhance the city's economic impact and service level as a core city.

As China's largest city best known for its pre-eminent achievements in the early part of the twentieth century, Shanghai grew modestly in comparison with southern China after the adoption of China's open policy in 1978. With the 1990 announcement of Pudong as an area for special development, Shanghai has raced ahead, seemingly on its way to an economic and cultural resurgence that is likely to accelerate development and modernization in the Yangzi Delta and China at large. This volume focuses on the physical and socioeconomic transformation of Shanghai across a wide range of topics. Drawing on the experience and expertise of researchers primarily in Hong Kong, this study is a major contribution to the subject of economic development and social change in China. It seeks to understand, analyze and interpret how Shanghai has transformed itself in recent years.

"In vivid detail... examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties."--The Boston Globe "Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history."--LA Review of Books An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.

In Middle Class Shanghai, Cheng Li, who grew up in Shanghai during the oppressive years of Mao's Cultural Revolution, argues that American policymakers must not lose sight of the expansive dynamism and diversity in present-day China. The caricature of China as a monolithic Communist apparatus set on exporting its ideology and development model is simplistic and misguided. Drawing on empirical research in the realms of higher education, avant-garde art, architecture, and law, Li's unique study highlights the strong, constructive impact of bilateral exchanges. Combining eclectic human stories with striking new data analysis, Li's book addresses the possibility that the development of China's class structure and cosmopolitan culture--exemplified and led by Shanghai--could provide a force for reshaping U.S.-China engagement. Both countries should build upon the deep cultural and educational exchanges that have bound them together for decades. Li concludes that U.S. .

In the decades following the introduction of Communist Party rule in Shanghai in 1949, the city's economy, infrastructure and links with the world all atrophied. However, the past decade has seen far-reaching economic reforms implemented to recreate Shanghai as a cosmopolitan, world financial and trade centre. This book focuses on the lives of local residents and their perceptions of their changing city, and presents an evocative series of ethnographic perspectives of the city's shifting sociological landscape in this period of transition.

Running 3,000 miles from the east-coast boomtown of Shanghai to the border of Kazakhstan in the north-west, Route 312 - China's 'Route 66' - is a road that Rob Gifford has always wanted to travel. Gifford's journey and his desire to get to the heart of this country make China Road an outstanding and funny travel narrative - part pilgrimage, part reportage - which illuminates a country on the move.