But clearly, not all Chinese are content with keeping things virtual: a doctor who runs a pregnancy helpline in Shanghai has said that half the calls she receives come from girls who met boys through the net.
There is not a single car plant in China, says Paul Gao, a consultant from McKinsey's Shanghai office, that has economies of scale.
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Dan Scheinman of Cisco, the world's largest maker of networking equipment, says that Shanghai, too, has achieved a critical mass in the numbers of software engineers available.
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Seven have died of H7N9 flu in Shanghai, a key Chinese business hub that has been the hardest hit by the disease so far.
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In recent months, for instance, the widely followed Shanghai Composite Index has risen whenever investors have thought that Chinese officials would intervene to pump up the economy and has fallen whenever they, contrary to expectations, have not done so.
However, it seems that nothing has worked to prevent Shanghai crabs from multiplying every year.
Shanghai, of course, is a city that has great meaning in the history of the relationship between the United States and China.
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The Shanghai paper also reported that in recent times there has been an annual increase of 200 to 300 corpses retrieved in and around Lanzhou.
This vision from 1999 reads like an outline of the report published last month by Mandiant, a private-security firm, about "Unit 61398, " a Shanghai-based Chinese military team that since 2006 has mounted cyber assaults to steal terabytes of codes and other information from U.S. assets.
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On Tuesday, market techie Tom DeMark told Bloomberg that the last seller has sold the Shanghai Index.
The prevalence of wide-screen televisions, fancy stereos and home-karaoke machines in Shanghai apartments suggests that this new upper-middle class has more money than it admits to.
At a center for registering real estate transactions in Shanghai's Xuhui district, staff said that there has been a pickup in the number of applications for property deeds from homebuyers in recent weeks.
All it takes is one visit to Shanghai, and even an inexperienced visitor will feel that he or she has arrived at the epicenter of Chinese luxury purchasing.
The stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen are mobilising capital and allocating it with an efficiency that China has never seen before.
Vettel, Webber and Red Bull will begin to find out how much crossing that line in Malaysia has hurt them when they reunite in Shanghai.
Prices on a few projects in Beijing and Shanghai have already been raised as buying appetite has reappeared, driving officials to reiterate that the control measures are here to stay, said Jinsong Du, a Credit Suisse analyst.
If the Guangdong court rules that Apple has no right to use the iPad name, then the Shanghai court might take the decision into consideration.
"But Shanghai has always been known as the 'Paris of the East' and, even before that, the city was important in terms of trade, " he said.
Evergreen, for example, has opened nine offices there, while its EVA Airways has maintained branches in Beijing and Shanghai during the past two years - despite the fact that it can't fly to China yet.
They have so-called A shares that trade in Shanghai and Shenzhen and are only available for local investors because China has currency controls and China has controls whether the money can move in and out.
Even in Shanghai, where smoking incurs none of the opprobrium that it does in New York, tobacco advertising has been banned along the waterfront Bund, the city's equivalent of Times Square.
It has gone, too, in cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, where a survey recently found that many people said they would prefer a daughter on the grounds that daughters were more likely to care for their aged parents than sons.
Shares of Chinese companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq have held up well over the past year, in spite of the fact that the Shanghai Composite Index, which tracks the bigger of China's stock exchanges, has been one of the world's worst-performing markets.
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