Shanghai

Shanghai is the sprawling, fast-changing setting of the investigation into the bodies found at a Pudong construction site. The city’s construction boom, sharply contrasting districts, and contested police investigation make it more than a backdrop: its physical growth creates the conditions for discovery, while its institutions and political pressures shape what the detectives can say and do.

Scale and urban change

In Nien Mei-Ling’s account, Shanghai has fourteen million residents and 175,000 taxis, and combines China’s highest economic growth rate with its fastest-growing crime rate. Those figures place the case within a city expanding at extraordinary speed. They also frame the investigation as one problem among many in a metropolis where changing patterns of wealth and commerce produce both new opportunities and new vulnerabilities.

That transformation is visible in the Lujiazui financial district of Pudong. From the car, Li Yan and Nien Mei-Ling pass thirty-storey buildings, many with only a few illuminated windows: construction investment has outpaced demand. Across the Huangpu River, traffic is stalled along The Bund, where broad waterfront streets and grand stone buildings with European-style domes, spires, and clock towers recall cities abroad. The contrast between an underoccupied new business district and the older monumental waterfront gives Shanghai’s growth a distinctive unevenness: the city is being remade faster than every new structure can be used.

The older commercial streets present another face of that change. On Huaihai Road, Li recognizes the area as the former French Town, once known as Avenue Joffre, though he sees little evidence of the French settlement beyond the art nouveau Printemps department store. He wonders what is happening to five thousand years of Chinese culture in a city so visibly influenced by the West. Further along, Songshan Road is lined with cramped shops, aging apartments, crowded sidewalks, vendors’ goods, and narrow alleys. These streets offer a close-grained contrast to the empty towers of Lujiazui: Shanghai’s modernization does not erase its older urban life so much as place new development beside crowded and deteriorating neighborhoods.

The Pudong discovery

The investigation begins at a construction site in Pudong where police and forensic teams search for additional remains. The site is due to be covered in concrete as part of a large joint venture that has received extensive press and television attention. Li reasons that whoever left the bodies there would have known the project was about to proceed, potentially narrowing the search for people with relevant knowledge. Mei-Ling points out that the publicity still leaves an enormous pool of possible witnesses.

The early count itself reflects the difficult work of establishing what happened: detectives initially speak of eighteen bodies, while the recovered remains amount to sixteen heads and eighteen torsos, with further pieces still being sought. A nearby office block’s empty basement car park becomes a temporary place for the pathologists to lay out the recovered remains while the search continues. Later, Li describes the Shanghai victims as eighteen women, and his working understanding expands to include a nineteenth victim in Beijing. The change in scope turns a local discovery into evidence of a case crossing city boundaries.

Police headquarters and the investigation

The Shanghai Criminal Investigation Department headquarters, marked by the large gold numerals 803, is the institutional center of the inquiry. Li arrives from Beijing to lead the investigation, but his conclusions collide with a public position already communicated by the police. At a press briefing, the eighteen bodies from Pudong have been described as not being murder victims. Li then tells the detectives that Margaret Campbell, the American pathologist he brought in, believes the women were killed after being drugged and subjected to surgery while still alive. The room’s tension reflects not only the disturbing medical findings but also the fact that Section Chief Huang had briefed the Commissioner of Police before the public announcement.

The investigation proceeds through Shanghai’s medical and residential geography. Jiang Baofu is a final-year surgery student at Shanghai Medical University, with an interest in forensic pathology. He rents his own apartment in Ming-Xin Village despite having taken many jobs to support himself through medical school, an apparent financial anomaly that makes him a focus of Li’s inquiries. Detectives examine his apartment and interview people connected to his studies and residence, but suspicion alone does not establish a link to the murders. The city’s density supplies leads and connections, yet it does not automatically turn proximity into proof.

The department’s briefings also reveal the pressure surrounding the case. During one meeting, the room is crowded and tense beneath Huang’s watch, and Yue, the Procurator General, unexpectedly attends. Li presents the evidence gathered so far, including the autopsies, the victims identified, the re-examination of the Beijing victim, and the inquiries into Jiang. The detectives agree that Jiang is suspicious but acknowledge that they lack evidence tying him to the killings. Later, when Li asserts that the Shanghai murders, the Beijing murder, and the abduction of his niece Xinxin are linked, he gives the investigation a wider frame and asks the department to reconsider how its separate leads fit together.

A city connecting public and private lives

Shanghai’s transport and civic spaces repeatedly bring the investigators’ personal relationships into the work. At Hongqiao Airport, Li anticipates seeing Xinxin and Margaret’s return while knowing that Nien Mei-Ling’s presence may intensify the strain between him and Margaret. Xinxin greets Li enthusiastically; Mei-Ling quickly befriends her, while Margaret’s smile fades and she responds sharply to Li. The airport encounter makes visible a conflict that cannot be cleanly separated from the professional partnership bringing them together in Shanghai.

The city also becomes the setting for a search that exposes the fragility of official access. After Li obtains a warrant to search Cui Feng’s clinic, a police convoy crosses Shanghai to reach it. The clinic is dark, its gates chained shut, and Li concludes that someone has warned its occupants. Officers cut the chain and enter the premises, while the episode raises the possibility that information is leaking from within the system. Back at 803, detectives work to obtain warrants for the clinic’s employees, as the investigation accelerates amid the department’s crowded offices and competing demands.

Political geography and narrative significance

Shanghai’s influential people and institutions come together at a banquet at the Xiaoshaoxing Hotel. Cui Feng sits beside Director Hu among the guests when Li arrives and points Huang’s gun at Cui. The confrontation brings the investigation into direct contact with the city’s political hierarchy: the suspect Li is pursuing is seated beside the official who had appointed him, and Li’s action disrupts a gathering from which he was not invited. Shanghai’s restaurants, police offices, clinics, construction sites, and residential towers are thus connected not simply by distance but by the conflict between investigative evidence and power.

For Li, Shanghai remains culturally disorienting. He dislikes its rain, misses Beijing’s winter and the winds of the Gobi Desert, and feels uncertain about where it is safe to walk. He sees the city as a hybrid shaped more by Western than Eastern influence and says he does not feel he is in China. That is his unsettled perspective, not a neutral definition of Shanghai; the city’s French-era traces, European-looking Bund, modern glass and concrete developments, and older crowded streets all contribute to the feeling. Its narrative importance lies in holding these contrasts together while the investigation forces Li to navigate a place whose rapid change and institutional connections continually complicate the search for truth.