Interplay of dark and light

China city skylines are both beautiful and grimly ugly

- Jim Freeman

The symbol of 21st-century China, I would like to think, is a crane; not the feathered kind because that's Japan's signature animal, but one of those jutting into the sky, signaling to one and all that big things are happening below.

For those of you that haven't been to China, take my word for it; nothing prepares you for its cities. Admittedly, I visited only two, but eight days in Shanghai and Wuhu left me gobsmacked from the first minute to the last.

It wasn't their "foreign-ness" that took my breath away; it was the skylines that left me alternately awestruck and horrified (sometimes within the space of a few hundred meters) at their beauty and rank ugliness: dreams and aspirations on one hand, stark reality on the other.

Light and shadows.

It is in the latter, both downtown and on urban fringes, where you find the cranes as construction (and reconstruction) takes place at an incomprehensible pace.

My hotel room in Shanghai, located in the heart of the glittering business district, looked out over the 6,300km-long Yangtze River, the lifeline of commerce in that part of the country.