Black and white half-body portrait paintings of forty-two children line the front of the French Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo. The children show a variety of expressions — smiling, crying, frowning… — and are dressed in simple clothes.
“Children of Shanghai,” a work of 21 painted stainless steel panels, is an artwork by local artist Yan Peiming.
All the children’s parents are migrant workers who worked on the construction of the pavilion, said Zheng Lan, a staff member of the French Pavilion.
Yan Peiming said the children, who came from the countryside to Shanghai with their families, are part of a rural exodus that has lead to the city’s population explosion.

A comprehensive three-dimensional (3D) urban geology information system, which will provide geological assistance for urban planning and development, is expected to be established in more than 100 cities in the country.
“As China’s urbanization process is in progress at an ever-increasing pace, many construction problems crop up because urban safety and geological factors are not adequately considered ahead of time,” Wang Min, vice-minister of land and resources, told the International Symposium on Urban Geology, which concluded on Thursday, in Shanghai.

Shanghai’s property market and some wealthier areas of Beijing may be starting to overheat, even as housing prices on the mainland more broadly are not rising excessively, the International Monetary Fund said. “Mass-residential markets in Shanghai and Shenzhen and luxury residential markets in Beijing and Nanjing may be in the early stages of excessive price growth,” the Washington-based IMF said in its Asia and Pacific Regional Economic Outlook yesterday.

Small could be beautiful on China’s road to urbanization. Some 400 million people are set to move from rural areas to cities over the next 15 years, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.

There are fears that already crowded big cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing will not be able to cope with ever more rural migrants.

TWENTY foreign-invested projects worth 8.18 billion yuan (US$1.23 billion) were signed in Shanghai today as part of the economic fruits borne during the World Expo.