I talked with a friend today and he always cannot relate Shanghai with finance and operational type of city, and relate Beijing with culture, and media center. I believe that is the tend of thinking for many people.
In US, north may mean economy centers, and mean people are more business oriented, and for south, the people is more straight-forward culturally, and it is not as business oriented as the north.
In China, the situation is just the opposite. South coastal cities are very active in economoy, and veyr strong in businesses, and people there tend to calculate things more carefully, and preciously. The north provinces is more traditional, and more arigculture driven, and on the culture side, more straight-forward, and candid in communication.
If you compare people in Taxas and people in the three north east provinces, they share pretty much common characteristics, and if you put Shanghai and New York together, they share something in common.
It is something called IA (Implicit Association) as shown in the IAT (Implicit Association Test) by Harvard – people in US associate financial centers with coldness, and people in China associate financial centers with warm and hot.
When I went to New York for the firs time, I cannot get used to it since how can a financial center be so cold, just as cold as north east provinces in China? The same question is asked by my friend: how can a financial center be as warm as Shanghai?
Interesting observation.
Another difference: Technology centers in the US (Silicon Valley, Austin, Seattle) are far away from government centers (Washington DC). But in China the big technology center is also the big government center (Beijing).
Exactly, elliottng. This is also a result of history:
Shanghai used to the media center, and art center, and when the new China was established, the ecosystem of Shanghai was completely destroyed, and was not recovered till today.