Shanghai: what to see and whether to move there

What drives Shanghai and who it suits

Shanghai is mainland China's financial and trading capital. It holds the stock exchange, most multinationals' regional headquarters, the world's busiest container port by throughput, car plants for global brands, semiconductors, biotech, advertising and fashion. This is the city China shows to the outside world, and the standard of service, infrastructure and public transport beats most European capitals.

It is the most cosmopolitan city on the mainland, but not an English-speaking one: the international layer is about business and food, not about people switching to English wherever you go. The people who move here are corporate transferees, entrepreneurs in trade and manufacturing, sourcing and supply chain specialists, teachers, and rarely independent freelancers, because there is almost no legal route for them.

Honest context: the expatriate community shrank sharply after 2020 and has recovered slowly. Its composition changed, with fewer accidental arrivals and more people whose business genuinely depends on China. The market shows it: prime-district rents no longer climb the way they did, and finding an English-only job without Chinese is harder than a decade ago. The upside is that the frivolous edge is gone, and the city reads more clearly to anyone who came to work.

Neighbourhoods: where newcomers settle

Xuhui and the former French Concession are the prettiest and priciest part of town: plane trees, low-rise lane houses, cafes, and renovated two-bedrooms starting around RMB 18,000-20,000 and running well past RMB 40,000 for fully restored houses. Jing'an is somewhat cheaper and better placed on the metro, with one-bedrooms from roughly RMB 7,000. Huangpu covers the Bund and Xintiandi: handsome and noisy.

Pudong is the family choice. Lujiazui suits bankers, while Jinqiao and Kangqiao offer villas, international schools, greenery and parking, at the price of a fairly dead evening scene. Changning and Gubei host Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese families with familiar supermarkets and strong facilities for children. Cheaper living sits in Yangpu, Putuo, Baoshan and Minhang, where rents roughly halve and the centre is thirty to forty minutes away by metro.

There are no dangerous districts in the criminal sense; street crime is very low. The real risks are different: overpaying for an old building with no proper heating and a mould problem, careless agents, and above all subletting from someone with no right to lease. In that last case you will not get your residential police registration, and without it you cannot renew a visa or open an account.

Cost of living

Shanghai is expensive by Chinese standards and moderately expensive by global ones: local food, transport and services are cheap, while anything imported or international, from schooling to insurance, costs what it would in Europe or more. Deposits typically run one to three months, rent is often paid a quarter in advance, and the agency fee is around one month's rent.

A single person living mostly local fits inside RMB 12,000-18,000 a month; a family with international schooling passes RMB 60,000-80,000 easily, since tuition runs about RMB 150,000-350,000 per child per year. Public hospitals are cheap and competent but mean queues and Chinese-language intake, while international clinics charge several times more and hurt badly without insurance.

Practical matters: transport, climate, internet

The metro is vast and cheap, taxis come through apps, high-speed rail links half the country, and there are two airports: Pudong for international flights and Hongqiao mostly for domestic. Owning a car makes little sense, since Shanghai licence plates are auctioned and can cost as much as a used vehicle.

The climate is humid subtropical: sticky summers near 40C, the plum rains in June, typhoons in late summer, and a damp cold winter that people find harder than the numbers suggest, because the city has no central heating and older buildings simply lose their warmth. The comfortable windows are April to May and October to November. Air quality has improved a lot in a decade, but bad weeks still occur in winter.

On language, daily life is much harder without Mandarin; English shows up in international offices and some restaurants, not at the clinic or the building management desk. The internet is filtered: Google, WhatsApp, Instagram and most Western services need a VPN, VPN use sits in a grey zone and connections drop periodically, so plan your work channels before arriving. Payments have moved almost entirely to Alipay and WeChat, which now accept foreign cards, though a full bank account still requires a residence permit.

Moving and legal status

The main route is a Z work visa tied to a specific employer, who obtains your work permit, followed by a residence permit issued inside China, usually for one to two years. There is an M business visa for trips without employment, an X student visa, and since autumn 2025 a K category for young science and technology graduates that does not require an employer sponsor. Important caveat: K is an entry and job-search route, not permission to work on its own.

China has no dedicated nomad visa, and living on tourist entries is considerably harder here than in Southeast Asia. Visa-free access keeps widening, with transit stays of up to 240 hours for dozens of passports and unilateral visa-free entry for a set of countries, but these are travel tools, not a basis for residence. Permanent residence, the so-called green card, is rare and mostly goes to high-end specialists, investors and spouses of citizens.

On tax, residence is triggered at 183 days in a year, rates are progressive up to 45%, and worldwide income does not fall in immediately, since a multi-year continuous-residence rule applies to foreigners. Expat allowances for housing and schooling have been extended more than once, but confirm their status as at your move date. See our sections on residence permits and country tax profiles, plus the country page for China.

Is Shanghai worth considering as a base

The upsides: the city runs like clockwork, transport and delivery beat almost any global peer, street safety is very high, the food is superb at every price point, and access to manufacturing, suppliers and the Chinese market cannot be replicated remotely.

The downsides are serious. Your visa is nearly always tied to an employer, and losing the job starts a clock to leave. The filtered internet is not a small inconvenience but daily friction in real work. The language barrier is higher than the Bund postcard suggests. International schools and insurance cost London money. Regulation shifts quickly and without notice, and cross-border transfers need their own preparation.

Shanghai makes sense if you have a contract, a China-dependent business, or a concrete professional reason to be here. As a base for a free-floating remote lifestyle it fits poorly: there is no legal structure for it, and the practical constraints outweigh the romance of the plane-tree streets fairly quickly.