Brilliant sunshine coming up in Shanghai. Warm, sweet spring. Good weather to go out on. We fly soon. As I go…

If you stroll through the old French Concession in Shanghai — where Imperial China ceded control to the French a century and more ago — you’ll come upon, of all things, a vigorous tie to Boston…

A lot of China’s economic boom — and you could argue, all of it — has been built on the backs of migrant workers drawn from the poor interior of the country to the coastal beehive of industry and export.

OK, it’s time for some hard truth. Here’s the creepy side of China: You never know when the hammer of fear is going to come down…

The big news of the week here in Shanghai as we arrived, headlines all over the place, was about the former Communist Party Secretary of Shanghai, who has just been convicted and sentenced to 18 years in jail for corruption.

Let’s pull back the curtain on this trip a little bit. So much goes in to putting ten hour-long shows up, a lot of them live, from Shanghai.

Everything is for sale in Shanghai. In a crowded market deep in the Maximum City, music from all over Asia. The kids here are hip. The stuff you wear, they wear. Baggy blue jeans with wild embroidery down the back pockets. Urban attitude baseball caps on young guys who have probably never played baseball. Hoops, yes. I wake up in Shanghai to the sound of fierce basketball below my window. They’ve got game…

I’m getting a headache. Trying to carry the China view of the world and the USA view of the world in your head at the same time — and make a conversation between the two — can give you a migraine. The two can seem so polar opposite, so often. Not just we say “tomato” they say “tomaahhhto,” as the old song goes. We say “tomato,” they say “cabbage.”

It takes about two minutes off the plane in China to know you’ve stepped through the looking glass. If the face of the Olympics in the West is angry protestors grabbing for the torch, the Olympic face in China is global basketball star Yao Ming smiling across a giant billboard at global movie star Jackie Chan…

Headlines on my Shanghai doorstep: Musharraf of Pakistan slams “Western meddling” over the Olympics, and slams the “the ’superimposition’ of democratic values and human rights on China.” That complaint is music to some ears here. Front page news…