Twice to Shanghai, and twice surprised

Pakistani journalist Moiz Farooq stands on the Bund in Shanghai. [Photo provided to iShanghai]

I have stood on the Bund twice, a year apart, and on both occasions the city refused to repeat itself. My first visit was in 2025. My second came in May 2026. In the months between, Shanghai had not merely added buildings; it had added a kind of confidence that a visitor feels before he can explain it.

I arrived the first time carrying the usual baggage of a South Asian journalist: a head full of statistics and a quiet suspicion that the statistics were doing the heavy lifting. Pakistan's conversation about China is dense with figures, corridors, megawatts and tonnage. What I was not prepared for was how ordinary the extraordinary felt on the ground. The airport moved me through in minutes. The metro arrived when the board said it would. The taxi driver, with no shared language between us, solved the problem with a translation app and a laugh.

The Bund is where Shanghai explains itself best. On one bank stand the stone facades of the last century, heavy and European, built by an era that saw China as a market to be divided. Turn around, and Lujiazui rises across the Huangpu in glass and light, built by a China that decided its own future. Few cities in the world stage their own history so honestly, and fewer still can afford to. Shanghai does not hide the old buildings. It keeps them, restores them, lights them beautifully at night, and lets the skyline opposite make the argument.

Moiz Farooq takes a selfie high above Shanghai from the Shanghai Tower. [Photo provided to iShanghai]

I went up the Shanghai Tower on the first trip. At 632 metres it is a serious piece of engineering, but the detail that stayed with me was the twist in its form, a design decision that reduces wind load and, by doing so, saved thousands of tonnes of steel. The double skin, the sky gardens stacked inside it, the rainwater and wind systems: this is not a tower built only to be tall. It is a tower built to be defensible in an age of climate accounting. Standing at the observation deck, watching the river bend below through evening haze, I thought about how rarely ambition and restraint occupy the same structure.

My second visit sharpened the observations. Returning to a city is more useful than discovering it, because the novelty stops shouting and the systems become visible. I noticed how clean the streets remained at eleven at night. I noticed women walking alone without visible anxiety, a small fact that says a great deal about a society. I noticed the density of trees along Fuxing Road, the electric buses gliding past almost silently, the absence of horns. I paid for everything, from a bowl of noodles to a museum ticket, with my phone. In Yu Garden I watched a grandmother teach a toddler to feed the carp in a pond laid out five centuries ago, while a delivery rider on an electric scooter waited politely at the lane's edge. Shanghai holds these two timelines without strain.

Moiz Farooq visits Shanghai's Yu Garden at night. [Photo provided to iShanghai]

The food deserves its own paragraph and will not get one, except to say that the xiaolongbao (steamed soup dumplings) alone justify the flight, and that halal options were easier to find than in several European capitals I have worked in.

What I carried home was less a set of images than a set of lessons. Shanghai's achievement is not simply that it grew rich and tall. It is that the city held to a vision for four decades while governments, markets and moods changed around it. Pudong was farmland within living memory. It became one of the world's great financial centres because a plan was drawn and then honoured by every administration that followed, each one building on the last rather than starting over. Continuity, I realised, is itself a technology, and Shanghai has mastered it as completely as it has mastered steel and glass.

Moiz Farooq takes a selfie in front of Shanghai’s historic Wukang Building. [Photo provided to iShanghai]

The second lesson is about openness. A city of 25 million people that welcomes the world with this much ease has decided something about itself. I was a Pakistani journalist with rough Mandarin and endless questions, and at no point was I made to feel like an outsider. In the Shanghai Museum, a student spent 20 minutes walking me through a Song dynasty (960-1279) scroll simply because I had paused in front of it. That instinct, to share rather than to guard, is what turns a large city into a global one.

I have covered the China Pakistan Economic Corridor for years from the Pakistani side, closely and with care. Corridors are built of concrete, but they are sustained by people who have seen the other end of the road. I have now seen mine, twice, and I understand our partnership better for it.

I will go back. Shanghai has a way of making you feel that whatever it showed you last time was only a draft.

The writer is Executive Editor of Pakistan Economic Network and Daily Ittehad Media Group