TALES OF SHANGHAI
Zhang Xiang, China’s former Vice-Minister of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, talks to Brunswick’s Jinqing Cai about re-establishing Shanghai as Asia’s premier financial hub.
It is official policy: Shanghai is aiming to reclaim the status it enjoyed before the Second World War as Asia’s center of finance. In 2009, the State Council, China’s top decision-making body, formally directed the country’s ministries and regulators to support the city’s efforts to be ranked by the end of the decade on a par with the world’s top international financial centers (IFCs) – New York, London, and Tokyo.
Physical infrastructure is important to reach this goal, but so too is the image the city projects within China and to the world, especially so that it can attract top-level financial talent.
