Shanghai

My colleagues are right....New York and London are "so over." Everything is happening in Shanghai!!! We're really witnessing a historic shift in global economic power away from the West (insert Republican shudder of fear here) and toward China, and I am so lucky to be over here living and working for a brief time while all this is going on. It's like the Industrial Revolution in England and the US but all shoved into a few years. China is moving full speed ahead and no where is that more apparent than in Shanghai...A city of stark contrasts, Shanghai was at the center of the opium and silk trade and was on the verge of becoming the world's first great international city in the 1920s, then the war came and Japanese occupation and finally, communism crushed it. All the expats fled and the money was distributed to the poor rural areas of the country. The gorgeous French mansions and Arc Decco architecture entered a time warp. Millions of Shanghaiese rode to work on bicycles in their drab communist uniforms. Now that China has begun opening up, the city is buzzing again and on the verge to reclaim the greatness that Mao's Cultural Revolution took from it. Of course, it is also reclaiming all the problems that the Cultural Revolution shielded it from: Massive income inequality and poverty and hedonism and greed. So, now, along with the decrepit skyscrapers of the 1920s, there are sparkling new ones from multi-national companies from all over the world trying to cash in on the booming Chinese market. The two sections (old and new) are separated by the Yangtze River, with a stretch of old Shanghai on one side called "The Bund" and a stretch of sparkling new on the other called Pudong. These pictures are mostly from the polluted Yangtze River and the Bund....