When the municipality of Shanghai invited the city's leading society figures to a sneak preview of its new art museum last month, more than a celebration of culture was involved. Scheduled to open in November, the colonial-era building once used as a police storeroom and now renovated with state-of-the-art lighting and sleek marble and wood walls is also part of a challenge by the country's largest commercial city to Beijing for the title of China's cultural capital. The multimillion-dollar Shanghai Art Museum, which houses traditional and contemporary Chinese paintings, was only the latest major new public building in a spree that...
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