Shanghai

Shanghai is a giant city and your experience really depends on a few factors like:
1) where you live in the city
2) do you speak basic Mandarin
3) do you make nice money
4) do you have to use the internet

If you can afford to live in Jing'an or the French Concession, you can live a fashionable metropolitan lifestyle like you would in New York City. There's amazing food (Asian, Western and fusion). You'll be surrounded by entrepreneurs, artists, fashion designers and models. Many of whom do speak English.

It gets better if you speak basic Mandarin though. You don't need to care about the characters. Just learn to speak, that's important enough. The nice thing about Mandarin is China is so big everyone has an accent, so for Chinese it really doesn't matter so much that you have one too.

Depending on how and what kind of money you make, your experience also changes. Like most places in Asia, English teachers are the lowest rank in the hierarchy of foreigners here. Chinese know. But if you're an entrepreneur, even (or especially) an online one, that's high regarded. The problem with working online here is obviously the firewall which can make it very difficult. I've heard good stories about Shadowsocks which seems to work better than regular VPNs.

The recent China vs. America tensions are in fact making people slightly more hostile against Western foreigners. But remember this is Shanghai, it's a metropolitan city, they're usually much less xenophobic than out in the country. Mostly Shanghainese are happy to embrace foreigners, become friends with them, as long as they speak Chinese. And as long as you invest a lot of time. Just popping in and out like a nomad isn't necessarily going to work so well with Chinese. Relationships are long-term.

Be wary of LIES, lies everywhere.

Lies like when a local restaurant tells you it uses clean filtered water. Assume that you will drink polluted water once in a while. It does not only include bacteria but also heavy metal. Drinking bottled water ? The most popular company, Nongfu, was caught using wrong norms years ago. Too many people were boycotting so they changed the traditional red bottle... and removed the English name.

Lies like when they told you the internet speed using local servers. Local internet is actually not that bad, but since you would never use Baidu, Bing or any other unblocked search engine, then your VPN will throttle much of your speed and freedom. Add to that the fact that 2-3 times a year, a political meeting happens and they totally CUT all VPN access.

Lies when you try to know the air pollution and the weather agency chose not to update the air quality index to play with the averages. It's still unhealthy but it got A LOT better these last few years.

Lies like when you just try to know how many people live in Shanghai. Between 25-35 million people (depending on if you include migrant worker and nearby Suzhou soon to be connected by the same subway) means you get access to lots of stuff. Delivery is one (electronics, food). Subway is ridiculously cheap and modern. Taxis (just replace Uber by Didi) is also awesome and quite cheap.

Lies like when you read my review and count as many bad points as good, but you still get Chinese people asking you why you hate China so much...

Surprisingly expensive compared to many other places and there is a major language barrier for most western folks. You often end up hanging out with other nomads or expats for sanity.

It's expensive to drink, and it's not really to make many local friends and very few speak English or any western languages.

The internet is the killer for most folks and China is slowly closing down all the VPN connections from the commercial services, so it's getting harder and harder to find a way out for things like Gmail or even Google searches and even when it does work, it's really unpredictable.

Some of the hotels and workspaces have always-on VPN connections to Hong Kong for your internet handoff which eliminates the blocking and is a big help, but this is usually at a cost that is passed on to you.

I like Shanghai, but I find it very "showy". People want to make it clear if they have money, so you see lots of flashy cars, expensive clothes and "be seen" places. It's also amazing that you can go to a great restaurant and the table next to you will have six people sitting in complete silence because they are all on their phones.

As others have said, you need to figure out a way to get Alipay or Wechat pay money on your account so you can pay for things. Even people selling vegetables in the market have a QR code so you can pay them with your phone.

Didi is the local uber-like take service, and you can use western credit cards with it on your phone, and it's pretty cheap by western standards. Public transportation is good and cheap, too.

Cool place, but not inexpensive unless you are out a way and a serious language barrier and a bit of indifference to customer service or dealing with westerners in general.

I also want to share that no matter where you are in China, the fucking GFW is going to ruin your internet experience to max

MOST IMPORTANT for a digital nomad is the internet connection, the speeds are great BUT BEWARE THE GREAT CHINESE FIREWALL even if your download speed is 100mbps, for ANY non chinese site the speed will get limited and will come out to be smth like 12-15 mbps LOL YOU NEED VPN ALWAYS for blocked sites (e.g. google, google maps, facebook, youtube, telegram, whatsapp etc) and it won't save you if you gotta work because even if the site is not blocked the speed will be ridiculous because of the aforementioned.
Shanghai is cashless, you have to get a chinese bank account to load your wechat pay or alipay but you can still use these wallets for receiving money from someone else & be able to pay with it. it's just that you can't withdraw anything or load it with your own money if you don't have a bank account. but you can use some online services that will give you wechat pay/ alipay rmb for visa/mastercard usd for example.
the air is really bad, you may not notice it right away(unlike in ho chi minh city because of the bikes), but give it a couple of weeks and it'll kick in. i haven't gotten sick once for 2-3 years and once i got to Shanghai i got sick (coughing, sore throat etc.) multiple times in 6 months, always coughing up something.
i do miss Shanghai now, but what drove me away was pollution and the complete lack of people's manners (e.g. smb will spit next to you inside a building or in the elevator- they say it was way worse before, like spitting in a conference room during a meeting - and you never know where that is gonna land; shoving, pushing, lack of respect for personal space&queues). but hey, that's not my culture, who am i to judge.
the good things are the online shopping with next day delivery, you really don't need to leave your appartment at all, Shanghai being cashless, there's a lot of money going around if you wanna set up your own business. what happens in chinese parks in the morning is also pretty dope, everyday i'd pass through a small park next to my house there'd be people doing tai chi, some girl getting trained to fight with some kinda sword, old ladies dancing with large fans, a guy playing a flute, some pensioners dancing waltz or smth similar...and that's just your regular tuesday!
there's a camera for every 2 people in the country so it's very safe, they solve crimes fast. supposedly.
there's always smb staring at you in a 10m radius if you're a cute eastern european girl, which i haven't experienced in other countries in asia or otherwise.

I do not think Shanghai is a good work place due to GFW and bad PM2.5.

If you need wechat pay, find a Chinese friend as exchange some cash for digital yuan in the wechat wallet

Too many people to live a good life here

Shanghai isn't cashless for foreigners. It's near impossible for foreigners to use WeChat Pay or AliPay