[Big News] CNS Opens Its First Community Hub in Qingpu District

Shanghai Is Building Community for Its World Citizens. Xujing Just Got the First Room.

Most expats know Xujing for one thing: It's where China's first Costco opened in 2019, to scenes that briefly made international news and have not entirely been forgotten by anyone who attempted the car park that day. The membership cards, the rotisserie chickens, the imported cheese in quantities calibrated for a family of eight: Costco became, immediately and improbably, one of the great equalizers of Shanghai expat life.

But Xujing was already more than a Costco delivery radius, and it remains more than that now. Families who followed the westward drift out of the Xuhui, through Gubei in Changning District and further still, have been arriving here for years, drawn by the space, the schools, the Jiangnan greenery, and the not-insignificant fact that Zhujiajiao is essentially down the road.

The number captures it best: 14,800 foreign residents, from 125 countries and regions.

A Space Built for the People Who Live Here – What Is It Here For?

What a community that size eventually needs is a place to come together. That space opened on March 27. Lidoway · CNS Community launched at Lidoway Town Center Plaza in Xujing Town, a joint initiative between City News Service and Qingpu District, designed to function less like a service counter but more like a neighborhood anchor. City News Service now has a dedicated Community Hub clocking in at 54 square meters, with a cafe inside, and space for the community to meet up in, and use.

The practical infrastructure is real and deliberately chosen. Working with Qingpu's exit-entry administration authorities, the hub runs an interactive "Ask CNS" device connected to immigration services, brings in specialists weekly for in-person consultations on visa renewals and residence permits, and provides guidance on healthcare, schooling, payment services and social insurance.

These are the specific, recurring friction points of expat life in China: the paperwork, the processes, the questions that take a confident person and make them feel, briefly, like a lost newcomer all over again. Having somewhere to go, and someone to ask, matters more than it sounds.

Liu Qi, editor-in-chief of Shanghai Daily, put the significance plainly at the opening. The launch, she said, marked a genuine shift: international communication moving from content platforms into community touchpoints, from something you read to something you walk into. Shanghai has always had information available to its foreign residents. What this represents is a different order of commitment: The city meeting people at street level, in the neighborhood where they actually live.

More Than Services

Beyond the practical, the community pavilion sits in the middle of Lidoway Town Center's wider commercial area, surrounded by cafés, restaurants and creative spaces, and the programming reflects that. Regular activities will be built around the things that actually structure expat neighborhood life: fitness groups, pet owners, parents, and the secondhand economy that every expat community quietly runs on.

The cultural calendar is where it gets more interesting. The hub will run hands-on seasonal events tied to the Chinese calendar: qingtuan (the glutinous green rice cakes that appear around Qingming Festival, and that most foreign residents have eaten but few have made) making in spring, fragrant sachet crafting ahead of the Dragon Boat Festival, moon-viewing gatherings in autumn.

These won't be museum demonstrations. They'll be the kind of things your neighbors and colleagues do at home, and the hub is designed to make them accessible to residents who otherwise experience Chinese traditional culture largely from the outside. Nearby international schools, including Western International School of Shanghai, will be woven into that programming as well.

Jeremy Williams, headmaster at Western International School of Shanghai, was at the opening and made the case for it simply. "What I would look forward to is an opportunity for connection," he said. "As head of school for an international school community, it is important welcoming people making friends and making connections from all over the world."

Whether you've been in Xujing for a week or a decade, this is the kind of place, he suggested, that helps you find where you belong.

The Neighborhood Shows Up

The opening gave a convincing first impression of what that belonging looks like in practice. The Lidoway Bazaar brought together expat entrepreneurs, local vendors and merchants from the wider Lidoway network, with stalls covering handicrafts, cultural goods, international snacks and secondhand finds. It had the easy, unhurried energy that expats who have been in Shanghai long enough know to chase when they find it.

Nari Elhadidi, an Egyptian artist showing her sterling silver jewelry at one of the stalls, discovered the space for the first time that day.

"It's not too far from where I live, and it's a great discovery," she said. "A lot of restaurants, open spaces, there's a pedestrian road so kids can run around, lots of pets. It's a lovely space."

She arrived without knowing what to expect and left wanting to come back. That, in its own way, is the whole story.

The afternoon closed with a Peach Blossom Banquet, spring-themed, warm-lit, with a menu moving between Chinese, Western and Southeast Asian dishes. The "See China · Qingpu" CNS cultural route also launched at the event, a new itinerary threading together the district's heritage sites, water-town landscapes, villages and commercial destinations into a coherent invitation to explore a part of Shanghai that most people still underestimate.

The Intention Behind the Square Meters

Shanghai has 24 million residents. Its foreign community is a fraction of that, scattered across neighborhoods and towns, navigating a city that was not built with them in mind but has been, deliberately and increasingly, rebuilt to include them.

What has opened in Xujing is one visible expression of that shift. The decision to put a physical space on the map, staff it, connect it to real administrative services, and program it across seasons and communities is not a small gesture. It is a city looking at the people who chose to make it home, from 125 countries and regions in one town alone, and deciding they deserve more than a website and a helpline.

Lidoway · CNS Community is part of that larger effort. City News Service has spent three years building something with Shanghai's international residents, listening to what they need, and routing that feedback directly to the city departments that can act on it. This space is the next step: somewhere you can walk into, sit down, and be heard in person.

Shanghai has always carried internationalism in its DNA. The city knows what it gains when the world shows up and stays. Xujing, on a warm Friday in spring, with 125 countries and regions represented in one town and one new room open for all of them, was a reminder of exactly that.

City News Service was launched in 2022 under the guidance of the Information Office of Shanghai Municipal and operated by Shanghai Daily. At first, it served as a reliable portal for official city information aimed at international audiences, a centralized source in a digital landscape that can often feel fragmented. But this year, CNS is transforming itself into an all-in-one urban platform, stepping into a much larger role in Shanghai.

(Zhu Yile and Ethan Quek also contributed to the story.)

And now, a few more photos from today's event