A drive to the airport in Shanghai from an outlying suburb earlier this week revealed an entirely new city to me. Brand new high-rise apartments rose in thick clusters in the near distance, as new access roads zigged, zagged and looped around new train and subway stations.
Mine was not the usual surprise of newcomers to this city, but rather that of someone who had lived there for six years, up until 2009. Shanghai was already plenty big and new and physically impressive then. But to look at the way entirely new zones—from Pudong in the east to the southwestern district where I recently stayed—have developed since then brought new perspective on the immensity of what China has achieved, and not only in this showcase city of more than 20 million people.
Yet as impressive as Shanghai is, there is still much that China is far from accomplishing. That is apparent when the view shifts hundreds of miles south to the ominous situation unfolding in Hong Kong, the site of an earlier Chinese miracle, albeit one that was largely built under a century and a half of British colonial rule that ended in 1997.