Yesterday, I had two meetings with people who were on their first trips to China. These meetings are always interesting because I hear their first impressions of the country and people, and how these have had an immediate impact upon them. There is usually an expectation that China is going to look very different from elsewhere in the world and they quickly realise, that in fact Shanghai on the face of it could be just another global city. This is in fact true on the surface, if I showed anyone a picture of the streets of the city and removed the Chinese faces, the image could be anywhere. Unfortunately, below this thin visual veneer, everything else is very different.…

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