Notable developments

The news of the development and opening-up of Pudong New Area spread from the small office building to the world, luring investment and projects to land on the "new area" in the 1990s.

In his book, He profiled the most significant of these projects, which include the construction of the Nanpu Bridge that connects Pudong with Puxi.

The bridge, which prominent Chinese American engineer Tung-Yen Lin helped to design, was pivotal in solving the transportation bottleneck that affected the city at that time. He also wrote about the construction of the cable-stayed Yangpu Bridge which was the longest of its kind in the world when it was completed in 1993.

Another project that is mentioned in the book is the construction of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. He wrote that the idea behind this structure came from Zou Fanyang, the previous director of the Shanghai Radio and Television Bureau who was inspired by the CN Tower in Toronto during a visit in the early 1980s.

He also documents the building of the 492-meter Shanghai World Financial Center which was beset with many delays — the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the Sept 11 terror attack in New York and the 2003 SARS epidemic in China.

The Shanghai Disneyland project is also mentioned. He reveals that though the idea of the theme park was brought up in 1990 by the then Shanghai mayor Zhu Rongji, real negotiations did not start until 2001. It was only in 2016 that the park finally opened.

"There is no project more difficult than the Disneyland development," said Cheng Fang, a former official with Pudong district government who participated in the whole negotiation.

"It was the success of the Shanghai World Expo that helped us secure the deal, and the strong development of our country gave us confidence in negotiating with Disney," Cheng added.

He Jianming's new book Pudong Epic details the rapid growth in Pudong.