Shanghai is a city of extremes with more than 26 million people squashed together in a mad urban social experiment. On the one hand, the city is post-futuristic where facial recognition systems control traffic violations and publicly admonish j-walkers. Metro systems and the largest high speed rail system on earth hurtle more than four million people a day across 25,000km of track. The writer Patricia Marx wrote: “New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn’t even sit down.” That relentlessness fuels an infectious entrepreneurial mentality. When we walk around our neighbourhood in Shanghai, we are warmly greeted as the waiguoren, which means the “outside people”.

Source: The Irish Times November 19, 2019 12:02 UTC