ABSTRACT
Shanghai at the millennium’s turn was a city in a hurry. It was rushing to reinvent itself economically: it had a newly opened stock market, local financiers dreamed of their city displacing or at least once again rivaling Hong Kong as a financial hub, and information technology was taking off as an important local industry. The city was struggling to re-establish itself as a cultural hub, via hosting events such as the “vast art exhibition” alluded to above, which made the most of newly
built showcase structures, including the Shanghai Museum. It was a place were old edifices were being ripped down and replaced by new ones, with low-lying neighborhoods in the central part of the city being razed at an alarming rate, sometimes to make way for totally different kinds of structures (such as towering office buildings and hotels), but in one famous case-that of the Xintiandi shopping and entertainment district (that opened in 2001)—replaced by a spruced up replica of its former self.
