The Anglo-Americans had their Manhattan, the Japanese had Tokyo. Hong Kong 
was a nice piece of work, but it was essentially Western. When the Overseas 
Chinese came back to the homeland to build their monument to enterprise, they 
had done it here, and they had done it bigger and brighter, and unquestionably 
redder, than any of those other cities. The nanotechnological trick of making 
sturdy structures that were lighter than air had come along just at the right 
time, as all of the last paddies were being replaced by immense concrete 
foundations, and a canopy of new construction had bloomed above the 
first-generation undergrowth of seventy- and eighty-story buildings. This new 
architecture was naturally large and ellipsoidal, typically consisting of a 
huge neon-rimmed ball impaled on a spike, so Pudong was
bigger and denser a thousand feet above the ground than it was at street 
level.