Shanghai, the city on the sea

Shanghai has almost 25 million inhabitants, more than twice the population of Belgium, and generated a GDP of 5.67 trillion yuan in 2025, up 5.4 per cent on the previous year. For a European company the city is three things at once: the world's busiest container port, the place where multinationals base their China headquarters, and the market where Chinese consumers try out new brands first. That is why understanding China often starts here. The China Business Mission 2026 also opened in Shanghai on 11 and 12 October, before the delegation travelled on to Hangzhou, Hefei and Beijing.

From fishing village to treaty port

The name says it all: 上海 literally means on the sea. In 1292 the small town of cotton and fishing at the mouth of the Yangtze became a district in its own right. The real turning point came after the First Opium War. The Treaty of Nanjing opened Shanghai to foreign trade in 1843, and the French, British and Americans were granted their own concessions. In the 1920s and 1930s the city was one of Asia's largest ports and financial centres, with banks on the Bund, art deco hotels and its own film industry. It was in the French Concession that the Communist Party held its first congress in 1921.

After 1949 Shanghai lost that international role. It only returned when Beijing decided in 1990 to develop Pudong, the eastern bank of the Huangpu, then mostly farmland and warehouses. Today it is home to Lujiazui, the financial district with the Shanghai Tower, at 632 metres the tallest building in China.

Why Belgium turns up here more often than you might think

Two people from Shanghai helped write Belgian history. Lu Zhengxiang (Lou Tseng-Tsiang), born in Shanghai in 1871, served as foreign minister and twice as premier of the Chinese republic. In 1919 he led the Chinese delegation at Versailles and refused to sign the treaty. He was married to the Belgian Berthe Bovy and, after her death, entered the Benedictine abbey of Sint-Andries in Bruges in 1927, where he died in 1949.

The second is Zhang Chongren. He grew up in the Jesuit orphanage of Tushanwan, came to the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts on a scholarship in 1931 and met Hergé in 1934. He helped him with The Blue Lotus, the Tintin album set in Shanghai, and the character Chang is named after him. In Qibao, now part of Shanghai, a museum is dedicated to him.

The business link runs mainly through diamonds. The Shanghai Diamond Exchange opened in Lujiazui on 27 October 2000; wholesalers from Belgium, India and Israel form the core of its membership. In 2010 the exchange and the Antwerp World Diamond Centre signed the Diamonds Love Antwerp agreement, under which stones go directly from Antwerp to Shanghai. According to the Pudong district, trading on the exchange exceeded 1.5 billion dollars in the first eight months of 2025.

A port and a headquarters city on a global scale

In 2025 the port of Shanghai handled 55.06 million containers (TEU). It was the sixteenth year in a row that it ranked as the world's busiest container port. More than half of that volume went through Yangshan, the deep-water port on islands off the coast. By comparison, Antwerp-Bruges, Europe's second-largest port, handled 13.63 million TEU.

Shanghai is also where foreign companies run their China operations. In February 2026 the city counted 1,084 regional headquarters of multinationals and 647 foreign R&D centres. Foreign trade reached 4.51 trillion yuan in 2025. From 5 to 10 November 2026 the city also hosts the ninth China International Import Expo, the annual fair where foreign companies present their products to Chinese buyers.

Chips, AI and medicine: where the city is placing its bets

Shanghai is not just a services city. Industry and software together account for half of GDP, and the city has chosen three engines: chips, biomedicine and artificial intelligence. In 2025 chip output grew by 15.1 per cent and AI output by 13.6 per cent. In the first three quarters of 2026 that accelerated to 23.4 and 24.8 per cent, according to the city's statistics bureau, while value added across industry as a whole grew by 5.5 per cent.

The industrial plan for 2026 to 2030, presented at the end of August, aims for industry to deliver at least 20 per cent of GDP in 2030. New sectors such as quantum technology, brain-computer interfaces, nuclear fusion, biomanufacturing and 6G are expected to generate more than 100 billion yuan together. Meanwhile manufacturing is running at full speed: Tesla's Gigafactory in Lingang delivered around 851,000 cars in 2025, 52 per cent of all Teslas worldwide. How the city brings AI companies together can be seen at Model Space, the incubator for developers of language models.

A test lab for the Chinese consumer

Disposable income per resident reached 91,987 yuan in 2025, one of the highest in the country. Brands often open their first Chinese store here, and platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Dewu, Pinduoduo, Bilibili and Hema are headquartered in the city. Even coffee tells a story: Shanghai had 10,336 coffee shops in 2025, more than a thousand more than a year earlier.

Yet consumers are not an automatic growth engine. In the first three quarters of 2026 retail sales were 1.1 per cent lower than a year earlier, while exports grew by 22.3 per cent. For a European brand this means buyers are demanding and price-conscious, and their search starts on social platforms rather than in a webshop.

That openness has a name: haipai (海派), the style of the sea, a blend of Chinese tradition and Western influence from the concession era. You see it in the shikumen terraced houses of Xintiandi, in the art deco along the Bund and in the kitchen. Benbang dishes are sweet and rich in soy sauce, and the xiaolongbao, a steamed dumpling filled with soup, is the city's calling card. In autumn Shanghai eats hairy crab, the same Chinese mitten crab that lives in the Scheldt as an invasive species. And since 17 October 2026 the city has a new cultural landmark: the Shanghai Grand Opera House by the Norwegian practice Snøhetta on the Huangpu, with a spiralling roof that visitors can walk on freely.

Where Shanghai fits in a China strategy

Shanghai is rarely the cheapest place to manufacture. Factories are often located in the surrounding provinces of the Yangtze River Delta, such as Zhejiang and Anhui, a few hours away by high-speed train. The city itself is where capital, talent, partners and demanding customers come together. Companies that want to sell in China test a product here. Those that want to produce or source use Shanghai as a base for the region. And those mainly worried about competition can see early on which chips, robots and electric cars will soon reach Europe, because the city's industry is growing faster than its consumption. What this looks like one train ride further is explained in the article on Hangzhou; the broader approach is covered under doing business in China.