Each phase in the long history of the world economy raises specific questions about the particular conditions that made it possible. One of the key properties of the current phase is the ascendance of information technologies and the associated increase in the mobility and liquidity of capital. There have long been cross-border economic processes—such as flows of capital, labor, goods, raw materials, and travelers. But over the last century these flows increasingly took place within the interstate system, where the key articulators were national states. The international economic system was ensconced largely in this interstate system. This has changed...

Since the early 1980s, researchers have been struck by the dynamism of new industries—dubbed “high-tech”—and their apparent roles in driving differential regional growth rates. Older American industrial and financial cities such as New York and Chicago, growing slowly and subject to considerable deindustrialization, no longer seem capable of performing as “seedbeds of innovation” (Markusen and McCurdy 1989), whereas places such as Silicon Valley and Route 128 outside Boston have become famous as prototypical new industrial regions (Saxenian 1994). Although some of the purported drivers of high-tech location, including university research and development activity, are not borne out by...

Shanghai, like all major cities, is competing in an increasingly fast-paced, networked world that is formed by a catalytic convergence of digitization, globalization, aviation, and time-based competition. The combined thrust of these forces is creating a new economic geography, with international gateway airports driving and shaping business location and urban development in the twenty-first century as much as highways did in the twentieth century, railroads in the nineteenth century, and seaports in the eighteenth century. Today, gateway airports have become key nodes in global production and enterprise systems and engines of local economic development, attracting air commerce linked businesses of...

Harvey’s observation, written almost twenty years ago, indicates one impact of globalization, the rise of intercity competition and its effect on the landscapes of competing cities. With economic globalization, cities are driven to become more competitive in developing strategies to attract both capital and skilled labor. The literature has covered the place marketing and development strategies that were attempted (e.g., Hubbard and Hall 1998; Olds 1995) as well as the consequences in terms of the state’s regulation and treatment of different groups (e.g., Body-Gendrot 2000; Holston and Appadurai 1999; Mayer 1999). In the development literature, apart from the very large...

Globalization is relatively new to Shanghai, which was cut off from the rest of the world in 1949 and not fully reintegrated with the global economy until the early 1990s. Globalization is nothing new to Hong Kong, which is an open economy with no restrictions on foreign trade and investment. From its early days as a British colony in the nineteenth century, Hong Kong has been an important trading port as well as a commercial city-not only for the advancement of the economic and political interests of the British Empire, but also for the facilitation of regional trade and finance...

The reemergence of Shanghai as a major world city in the 1990s has drawn extensive attention in both scholarly research and opinion journalism (see Gu and Tang 2002; Haila 1999; Murphey 1988; Olds 1997, 2001; Ramo 1998; Yusuf and Wu 1997, 2002; W. Wu 1999; F. Wu 2000a, 2000b, 2002, 2003; Yeung and Sung 1996; Yatsko 1996a, 1996b, 2001, Yatsko and Forney 1998). Joshua Ramo, a senior editor ofTimemagazine, provided a vivid personal observation of the changing urban landscapes, “if you are lucky enough to fly into Shanghai in the late afternoon, up along the coast from Hong...

If the globalization of Shanghai is a state project, as argued by Fulong Wu in the previous chapter, it raises the question of whether and how the state’s role may vary across sectors and spaces of the local economy in driving Shanghai’s globalization. Although the state has served as the initial trigger for and sustained a strong influence on market reforms and the opening up of Shanghai, it has withdrawn or retreated from some economic and social spheres while remaining actively involved in selected others. Therefore, it makes sense to study a specific economic sector of Shanghai that draws continued...

Following the sectoral focus on the telecommunications and information sector in the preceding chapter, this chapter turns to the urban district level by examining local transformation within and across three distinctive administratively bounded areas of Shanghai in the larger context of China’s reforms since the early 1980s. The transition of the economy from centralized planning to market-oriented and the devolution of decision power from the central government to municipalities on local economic decisions have attracted the attention of many scholars (Yeh and Wu 1996; Logan 2001; Zhang 2002a). China’s transition takes place in the era of globalization, which indeed plays...

Following Tingwei Zhang’s examination of local transformation in Shanghai at the urban district level, we move a notch down the spatial scale to the community in this chapter, which aims at probing how the structure and meaning of communal life have been directly and indirectly impacted by both the “touch-down” of global forces and the “bottom-up” collective and individual responses. Recent research links the structure and meaning of local communities to the process and impact of globalization by moving away from the classical (and dated) sociological idea of a society and a community as a well-bounded system and replacing it...

It is only fitting that we undertake an individual-level analysis of Shanghai as closure to the analytical flow of the four preceding chapters. This chapter completes the multiscaled analysis of the transformative impact of globalization on Shanghai in Part II of the book by examining the reactions and adaptations of local residents toward global brand fast foods and clothes. Using individual-level data, this analysis complements the more aggregate approaches of the earlier chapters and thus completes a full range of analytical scales for understanding the multiple dimensions of local transformations in the globalizing city of Shanghai.

If local transformations in...