The Dragon's Head: Shanghai, China's Emerging Megacity

Gary Watson is a former lecturer in Chinese studies at Queen’s University and is now a multimedia developer in Mississauga.

Until last year’s economic turbulence slowed its runaway growth,
Shanghai stood poised to become China’s centre of finance and
commerce. Its utter confidence in capitalism and official commitment to
the market were crucial in attracting foreign investors. Despite a drop
in the city’s fortunes and the confidence of global financiers,
Shanghai will doubtless continue its march to national and regional
preeminence in the next century.

Few have any understanding, though, of the enormous infrastructural
change this role will demand. This book attempts to explain Shanghai’s
economic geography, past and present, through 23 translated
chapter-length articles by geographers from Eastern China Normal School.
The articles deal with Shanghai’s physical setting, resources,
transport, urban growth, and commercial–industrial development. The
scarcity—outside a handful of specialist journals—of translated
Chinese scholarship makes this volume worthwhile. Not for the
statistically challenged, The Dragon’s Head includes a wealth of data,
much of it minutely focused, on Shanghai’s spatial and economic
structures. Not surprisingly, there’s scant mention of the
environmental costs coincident with growth on such a scale (a topic
exhaustively covered elsewhere by Vaclav Smil). The utility of The
Dragon’s Head is limited by the absence of a sizable introductory
essay or prefaces to the book’s five sections of essays.