China » Shanghai

A port city, lying at the mouth of Asia's longest and most important river, Shanghai is famous as a place where internationalism has thrived. Opened to the world as a treaty port in 1842, Shanghai for decades was not one city but a divided territory. The British, French, and Americans each claimed their own concessions, neighborhoods where their laws and culture rather than China's were the rule. 

In the 1990s, Shanghai emerged as the center of China's economic rebirth. A gathering of cultures, this was once a place where rich taipans walked the same streets as gamblers, prostitutes, and beggars, and Europeans fleeing the Holocaust lived alongside Chinese intellectuals and revolutionaries. The Communist Party was born here, but its strict tenets could not repress the city's untiring internationalism, which was determined at its creation. Resting on the Yangzi River delta, it marks the point where Asia's longest and most important river completes its 5,500-km (3,400-mi) journey to the Pacific. Until 1842 Shanghai's location made it merely a small fishing village. After the first Opium War, the British named Shanghai a treaty port, forcing the city's opening to foreign involvement. 

The village was soon turned into a city carved up into autonomous concessions administered by the British, French, and Americans, all independent of Chinese law. Each colonial presence brought with it its particular culture, architecture, and society. Although Shanghai had its own walled Chinese city, many native residents still chose to live in the foreign settlements. Thus began a mixing of cultures that shaped Shanghai's openness to Western influence. Shanghai became an important industrial center and trading port that attracted not only foreign businesspeople (60,000 by the 1930s) but also Chinese migrants from other parts of the country.

In its heyday, Shanghai was the place to be, it had the best art, the greatest architecture, and the strongest business in Asia. The Paris of the East eventually became known as a place of vice and indulgence. Amid this glamour and degradation the Communist Party held its first meeting in 1921. The thirties and forties saw invasion and war. The city weathered Japanese raids and then the victory of the Communists in 1949 over the Nationalists, after which foreigners left the country.

Today Shanghai has once again become one of China's most open cities ideologically, socially, culturally, and economically, striving to return to the internationalism that defined it before the Revolution. Shanghai's path to this renewed prominence began in 1990 when China's leader, Deng Xiaoping, chose it as the engine of the country's commercial renaissance, aiming to rival Hong Kong by 2010. If China is a dragon, Shanghai is its head.