20 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2007 Shanghai specialists can choose to ignore the theoretical discus- sions that are going on about global cities and the use of New Shang- hai as an illustrative case within some of this literature. But the dis- cussions will go on and the city will be used as an example of various things whatever scholars primarily interested in Shanghai do, so it might be more useful and appropriate for at least some of us to engage more directly with the new urban theory in a respectful yet also criti- cal fashion. Engagement of this sort seems promising for two reasons First, in-depth knowledge of Shanghai can be used to challenge, mod ify, or suggest alternatives to some influential moves in the rapidly growing literature on the twenty-frst-century metropolis, particular the assumption alluded to above (and returned to below) that global cities move along a steady trajectory toward ever greater internation- alization. 15 Second, though all of the new models for thinking about cities require some revision to fit the Shanghai case, many of them have things to offer China specialists in terms of insights into issues such as current patterns of urban development. This is true whether or not one is particularly interested in quantifiable factors such as the accessibility of "advanced producer services "that are central to the alpha-beta-gamma world city scheme alluded to above As it happens, though I am more interested below in qualitative issues than the types of quantitative ones(such as the number of head- quarters of transnational corporations in a metropolis) that some global city theorists emphasize, I find the category of gamma-class urban centers useful. One attraction it has for me is that it draws attention to similarities between Shanghai and some other urban cen- ters Beaverstock et al. place in it (such as budapest, Warsaw, and Istanbul) which could, like the metropolis by the Huangpu, be aptly characterized as reglobalizing cities More details on my alternate path to that gamma-frame category well as further explanation of my particular interest in analogies between Shanghai and reglobalizing cities that underwent a period of socialism( defined here simply as an era when the state set most wages and owned most property) and have more recently experienced rapid privatization of the economy, will have to wait, though, since first 15 For some minary comments on this theme, see Wasserstrom, "Comparing Incomparable' Cities "For a good introduction to the main issues addressed and approaches taken in the literature on“ world”and"“ global” cities, see Paul L. Knox and Peter Taylor, eds, World Cities in a World-System( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I995); and Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen, eds, Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order?(Oxford: Blackwell, 2ooo