Shanghai City Quotes & Sayings

China uses about half of the world's cement for its new roads and buildings.
According to the World Bank in 2007, China had 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities.
One day in January 2013, the air pollution index in Beijing was 755 - measured on a scale of 0 to 500!
In late 2012, 16,000 dead pigs were found floating in the river that supplies water to
Shanghai, the PRC's largest city.
For 2010, a ministry of the Chinese government estimated the monetary cost of the environmental damage caused by rapid industrialization at $230 billion, which is 3.5 percent of China's gross domestic product.
Air pollution from Chinese factories wafts over to the Koreas and Japan. Sometimes, upper atmospheric winds carry the sulphur dioxide from China's coal-burning clear over to North America's west coast. — James Peoples

The cause ceasing, the effect ceases also. — Edward Coke

That air of electric tension, of a great city on the edge of an abyss, is more noticeable than ever at the White Russian cabaret called, not inappropriately, "New York." You wouldn't know you were in China. An almond-eyed platinum-blonde has just finished wailing, with a Mott Street accent, "You're gonna lose your gal." ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

In Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe. In some cities, the air is so polluted that breathing is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. — Lester R. Brown

Children whose developing lungs are particularly vulnerable suffer the most from air pollution. For children, breathing the air in cities with the worst pollution, such as Beijing, Calcutta, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Tehran, is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. — Lester R. Brown

In the 1970s and early '80s, Shanghai was quiet, cautious, a ghost of a once-great city - and yet physically, little was changed from its glittering heyday. When visiting, I enjoyed reading books on local history and used my time off to scope out the former haunts of gangsters and jazzmen. — Nicole Mones

In 1865, Scotsman Thomas Sutherland started the Hongkong Shanghai Banking Company (later HSBC). A senior Chinese government official had issued a warrant for future HSBC board member Thomas Dent in 1839, to close his opium warehouses. This helped spark the first Opium War. France's Le Monde Diplomatique said that "HSBC's first wealth came from opium from India, and later Yunan in China." Yunan is in the Golden Triangle area. The first Opium War forced China to cede Shanghai to Western powers, transforming it from a fishing village to China's largest, most modern city with a network of opium smoking dens. Prof. Alfred McCoy would eventually call Hong Kong "Asia's heroin laboratory," and HSBC would become the world's second largest bank. — John L. Potash

She had a way about her that spoke of homemade bread, and caring for people, and the kind of patience that women have when they help a ewe birth a lamb, or stay up in the night with a baby calf bawling for its momma. — James Aura

Unlike, say, witch-burning, slavery, and apartheid, which were once taken for granted and are now officially outlawed, war is still with us. — Adam Hochschild

November 18, 2014: it's a day that should live forever in history. On that day, in the city of Yiwu in China's Zhejiang province, 300 kilometers south of Shanghai, the first train carrying 82 containers of export goods weighing more than 1,000 tons left a massive warehouse complex heading for Madrid. It arrived on December 9th. Welcome to the new trans-Eurasia choo-choo train. At over 13,000 kilometers, it will regularly traverse the longest freight train route in the world, 40% farther than the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway. Its cargo will cross China from East to West, then Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, France, and finally Spain. — Anonymous

Film is a machine: you never stop. — Sarah Gavron

When you're walking around in Shanghai, I called it the City of Near Misses, because they do not stop for pedestrians. And the pedestrians do not have the right of way. It's those little things that no one tells you. — Eliza Coupe

I was born in the city's general hospital on November 15, 1930, and we lived at 31 Amherst Avenue in the western suburbs. It was a magical place. There were receptions at the French Club, race meetings at the Shanghai Racecourse, and various patriotic gatherings at the British Embassy on the Bund, the city's glamorous waterfront area. — J.G. Ballard

Will: 'Singing the praises of our fair city? We treat you well here, don't we, James? I doubt I'd have that kind of luck in Shanghai. What do you call us there again?'
Jem: 'Yang guizi ... foreign devils. — Cassandra Clare

We have a very foolish notion in Western countries that progress delivers freedom. But progress doesn't necessarily bring moral virtue. — Richard Flanagan

New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn't even sit down, and not just because there is no room. — Patricia Marx

One especially prominent time loop lashes together two of the city's most celebrated high-rises -- the Park Hotel and the Jin Mao Tower -- binding the Puxi of Old Shanghai with the Pudong New Area. Each was the tallest Shanghai building of its age (judged by highest occupied floor), the Park Hotel for five decades, the Jin Mao Tower for just nine years. This discrepancy masks a deeper time-symmetry in the completion dates of the two buildings: the Park Hotel seven years prior to the closing of the city (with the Japanese occupation of the International Settlement in 1941), the Jin Mao Tower seven years after the city's formal re-opening (as the culmination of Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour, in 1992). — Nick Land

I was born in Suzhou, a city not very far from Shanghai. It's a very interesting town - there is a long artist's tradition there, especially during the Ming and Ching dynasties, which produced many, many scholars and painters and so forth. That's where my family lived for 600, 700 years. — I.M. Pei