Jake's View | Shanghai’s dreams of unseating Hong Kong will take more than pouring concrete
The reason Hong Kong is still China’s No 1 financial hub has nothing to do with how much concrete has been poured and how high we poured it
A surge in construction of grade A office buildings in Shanghai is set to help the mainland’s commercial capital overtake Hong Kong as the country’s biggest office market by 2020, according to global property services firm JLL. -- SCMP, May 24
I remember Shanghai’s office market from my first visit in the early 1980s.
I was standing on the Bund. In front of me across the river was a mangrove swamp. Behind me were four old buildings from the 1930s – Shanghai’s office district, its financial centre.
Try as I might, I could not even exchange US dollars for yuan foreign exchange certificates in the bank office that occupied one of these buildings. I had the wrong stamps on my paperwork. I had to go to the street to get my money. Better exchange rate anyway.
This backward state of affairs long annoyed the Shanghai city fathers as a fault line in the universe, a warp in the scale of space and time.
Shanghai is No 1. What is this ex-British colony stuck like a pimple on the coast line of Guangdong? How dare it challenge Shanghai’s primacy in commercial affairs?