[Abstract] A leading global city needs discourse power at home, cooperation momentum and resource allocation platforms. Building Shanghai into an international exhibition city can gather resources, increase cooperation opportunities, expand professional leadership discourse power, and seize the precious global opportunity for a leading global city. Shanghai's exhibition industry currently enjoys relatively leading advantages domestically and internationally. In the new era of high-quality development, while fully ensuring the success of major national strategic exhibitions, Shanghai should proactively plan for global governance-themed international forums to land in Shanghai, vigorously consolidate and enhance the world-leading position and global influence of brand exhibitions, meetings, celebrations, events and cultural activities, become stronger amid in-depth globalization, form distinctive strengths unique to Shanghai and insurmountable, and drive continuous improvement of urban capability level and core competitiveness.

Based on the core function of Shanghai's exhibition industry in allocating global resources, the research analyzes functional indicators of international exhibition activities with Shanghai as the central node in promoting global flow of resources, evaluates the development trend, comprehensive strength and distinctive strengths of global exhibition cities based on SMI's exhibition service power evaluation model featuring three major elements of venues, exhibitions and organizers; and then takes Shanghai's exhibition industry as the subject, benchmarks globally leading exhibition cities, analyzes Shanghai's exhibition industry in terms of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and proposes paths and strategies for building Shanghai into an international exhibition city.

According to the constituent elements, functional features, operation mechanisms and development environment of an international exhibition city, in order to play an overall strategic role, the exhibition industry as a modern service industry leader needs to build itself into a development highland with global influence that drives tertiary industry through forward linkage with tertiary industry and backward pull of related service industries, and promote construction of a leading global city and integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta. Meanwhile, the overall five-sphere layout requires Shanghai's exhibition industry to focus on forming a new pattern featuring flourishing development of exhibitions, followed by meetings, business travel, culture and sports, events and performances, and basically build itself into an international exhibition city by 2020 and fully by 2035, leveraging the east wind of CIIE in the coming three years.