Amid global uncertainty, Shanghai and New York keep the dialogue flowing | Rivers of Opportunities

2026.07.04 by Wang Yifei Editor's note: This article is part of Jiemian Global's special coverage of "Rivers of Opportunities: Shanghai-New York Dialogue," the New York edition of Our Water: Flowing from Shanghai — Intercultural Dialogues Among World Cities. The series looks at how Shanghai and New York are exploring common ground through city dialogue, finance, consumption, culture and sport. "More direct flights" The year Yao Ming left Shanghai was 2002. At 21, he boarded a flight to Houston with a basketball dream. Over the next two decades, his body came to straddle two worlds. On the NBA court, he was the center for the Houston Rockets, the first foreign player selected as a No. 1 draft pick, and an eight-time All-Star. After retiring, he returned to Shanghai, pushed for basketball reform, trained physical education teachers for rural areas, and tried to plant in China something he had brought back from another world. In him is an embodied history of China-US relations: from honeymoon, to friction, to recalibration. Fast forward to June 30, 2026, at Bloomberg's global headquarters in New York. The Knicks had just won the NBA championship. The United States was preparing to mark the 250th anniversary of its founding. New York was humming. At Bloomberg's headquarters, the Shanghai-New York Dialogue was under way.  Sitting onstage, Yao was asked by the moderator what China and the United States should do next in their relationship. He smiled and said: New York and Shanghai should open more direct flights. The audience applauded. At that moment, something more real than diplomatic language seemed to move through the room. It was the simplest wish, expressed in the simplest words, by someone who had spent half his life moving between two worlds: the roads must stay open; people must keep moving. Cities where rivers meet the sea The forum has now entered its third season. Starting from the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek, it first reached the Seine, then the Thames, and this time arrived on the banks of the Hudson. Three rivers, three cities, three dialogues. But this season carried an urgency that had not been felt before. The world of 2026 needs little explanation. The aftershocks of the trade war have not subsided. Technology and supply-chain tensions continue to weigh on the global economy. Structural tensions between major powers are no longer news, but background noise. In the same month, China and the United States were still arguing over semiconductor and rare earth supply chains. Against this backdrop, politicians, financiers, scholars, brand executives and athletes from both countries gathered in a conference room at Bloomberg headquarters to talk about investing in China, about the consumer cultures of New York and Shanghai, and about how sport and brands can cross borders. Why are they still talking? The answer may begin with water. "Shanghai and New York are both waterfront cities," Michael Bloomberg, now in his 80s, said in his opening remarks. Bloomberg, the company he founded in New York, entered the Chinese market in 1995 and has operated in China for more than three decades. Bloomberg himself has also met several Shanghai mayors over the years. Speaking of the relationship between Shanghai and New York, Bloomberg said great cities do not compete with each other. They learn from each other. Shanghai has the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek. New York has the Hudson River and the East River. The birth of both cities is, at its core, a story about water: where rivers meet the sea, trade often gathers first, people move first, and civilizations mix first. As DA Wei, a professor at Tsinghua University, said at the forum, the first words that come to mind when he thinks of the two cities are "openness" and "inclusiveness" — precisely the posture of rivers flowing into the sea. "Starting from water, nourished by water" is how the forum organizers interpret the theme of the dialogue series. From the Huangpu to the Hudson, the route is not only geographical. It is also a metaphor for flow itself: capital flows, information flows, talent flows, culture flows. And flow is the logic by which both cities exist. New York and Shanghai share a deeper similarity that outsiders may not always see. Both are their countries' most important financial centers, yet neither is the capital. Both project the image of their nations, yet both also have a fiercely distinct sense of urban identity: Shanghai people know they are Shanghainese; New Yorkers know they are New Yorkers. Perhaps it is this flexibility that allows city-to-city dialogue to find a channel for water even when tension rises at other levels. A few panels, a slice of the times The forum's financial roundtable was itself a slice of the times. The general manager of a Chinese state-owned bank and a strategist from America's largest investment bank sat at the same table to discuss the same question: are Chinese assets still worth investing in? Their answer was consistent: yes. ZHANG Yidong, chief economist at Haitong International, spoke with almost missionary enthusiasm. Investing in China, he said, requires "a different GPS" — investors should not look at old growth drivers, but at the 55% gain in the STAR 50 Index this year, at optical modules, humanoid robots and innovative drugs. "Only by finding the right question can you get the right answer," said LI Xiaowei, deputy general manager of Fullgoal Fund Management, offering more precise coordinates. The price-to-earnings ratio of China's large-cap A-shares is about 14 times, she said, compared with around 30 times for the S&P 500 — a significant discount that is being repriced. Leena Das of Bank of America added a sentiment dimension. Having followed China sentiment for 25 years, she said global investors had moved from viewing China as "uninvestable" to becoming "super bullish" during the DeepSeek period, and now to a more neutral position. "I think this is a good place to be," she said, adding that China is now more about alpha generation and stock picking than simply buying into policy expectations and selling when conditions improve. At this table, competition was not the main theme. Complementarity was. Kinger Lau, Goldman Sachs' chief China equity strategist, said the United States is the world's largest consumer market, while China is the world's largest producer. Economically, he said, the two countries have every reason to deepen their relationship in capital markets. Tom Orlik, Bloomberg's chief economist, who previously lived in Shanghai, noted that China's exports to the United States are equivalent to about 2% of China's GDP. China's growth, he said, has not mainly come from its relationship with the US, but from investment in its people and infrastructure, and from building a dynamic and competitive economy. The same, he added, is true for the United States. China-US relations are important, Orlik said, but competition should not be the main focus. Both countries should invest at home in education and infrastructure — in other words, focus on doing their own work. Da Wei echoed the point, saying both countries need to invest in their own people. He ended by quoting Mao Zedong: "Ten thousand years is too long; seize the day." Cities are the capillaries of an age of fragmentation The significance of this dialogue may lie not only in finance and investment, but also in the timing of the event itself. In an era of complex geopolitical tension, what role can city-to-city dialogue play? Mary Schapiro, vice-chair for global public policy at Bloomberg, offered her answer in the closing remarks: "Complexity is not a reason to stop talking. In fact, it is precisely the reason we must continue talking." Tang Zhiwen, minister at the Chinese embassy in the United States, said in his speech that great cities do not only compete with one another, but also learn from one another. "As challenges become increasingly complex and fluid, cities are playing an increasingly important role in responding to them," he said. This was not merely diplomatic language, but a precise judgment. When state-to-state relations face challenges, cities often remain spaces of elasticity. They are the capillaries that keep blood circulating between two societies. At the forum, Yao said one benefit of sport is that its rules are shared across geographies. Whether in China, the United States or elsewhere, people can understand the game through the same basic standards. That, in another sense, is also a metaphor for city dialogue: in those places where the rules remain shared, and in those fields where people can still speak the same language, connections must be maintained. Benliu does not argue; it flows Certainty may be the scarcest resource of our time. It is not stability, reconciliation or the erasure of differences. It is more like this: even in tense periods, there are still people willing to sit down and talk about investment, consumption, sport and urban renewal. It is a sustained choice, a kind of civilizational baseline. That is also the meaning carried by the Chinese title of the dialogue series, Benliu — a current that keeps moving forward. From the Huangpu to the Hudson, the route is not smooth. Rivers have shoals, countercurrents and dry seasons. The image of Benliu, or "flowing water," has never been about smooth sailing. It describes a refusal to stop — a willingness to keep surging forward, even against the current. In an interview with Jiemian News, Orlik said that although differences between China and the United States have already surfaced in trade frictions, financial frictions and geopolitical flashpoints, cities such as New York and Shanghai have never grown because there were no challenges. On the contrary, great cities become more prosperous by confronting and adapting to challenges. After three seasons, Benliu has chosen not to defend, not to stop, but simply to keep flowing. Shanghai and New York do not need to pretend there are no differences between them, or that there are no challenges. What they need is to preserve, above those differences, a shared grammar — about the flow of capital, the crossing of brands, the language of sport and the logic of urban growth. That grammar is being practiced again and again where two rivers meet. And Yao Ming, born in Shanghai, rising to global fame in the United States before returning to Shanghai with basketball, was himself proof that such a grammar exists.