The all-new Bund, symbol of Shanghai's capitalist past, will soon sport the perfect icon of a nakedly ambitious future, a replica of the great Bronze Bull of Wall Street, representing the aggressive aspirations of the world's newest financial superpower.

The new Bund Bull, created by the sculptor of the original Raging Bull of Wall Street, will take up residence on the stretch of Art Deco riverside that has symbolised Shanghai for generations.

However, the bull is just a tiny part of a wholesale rebranding of the city that starts tomorrow, with the opening of the Rmb400bn ($59bn) Shanghai World Expo – more than twice as costly as the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but, arguably, with a more enduring impact.

The bull, due to be unveiled on the eve of Expo, is yet another sign that, fresh from beating the financial crisis, China also plans global capital market supremacy – preferably by 2020, the deadline Beijing has set for Shanghai to become a global financial centre.

Even a bull twice his size would find the task difficult: from unreliable laws, to a non-convertible currency, a skilled talent gap and a 45 per cent tax rate, there are huge obstacles on the path to 2020.

“How can a country that blocks YouTube ever be a financial powerhouse?” asks one market analyst, only half in jest.

Still, the past year has seen big steps toward the transformation of Shanghai, not to mention its financial markets.

One of the biggest is Expo – the largest and most costly event that many FT readers have never heard of. Like past Expos, which gave the world everything from the Eiffel Tower to caramel corn and the US interstate highway system, this one could be memorable for decades – or it could be condemned as a waste of Rmb400bn.

The next six months, during which Expo will host up to 100m people, 95 per cent of them from China, will give Shanghai the chance to demonstrate whether there is substance behind the swank.

The city fathers have been gearing up for the event for decades but recently preparations have gone into overdrive: virtually every street has been repaved, new drains have been dug (sometimes more than once), new kerbs laid, new footpaths made and the length of the vast subway system doubled in a year.

Street-facing façades have been repainted or rebuilt by the government, often without notifying owners; motorways and bridges are decked out in new bright neon; city residents have gone to sleep beside grim building sites and woken to find fully grown trees where once was only mud and girders.

Every day seems to bring a new metro line or high-speed rail link – even a whole new airport terminal. The site itself – 5.28 sq km along the banks of the murky Huangpu river – has been adorned with more than 200 national, corporate and municipal pavilions, stately pleasure domes filled with visions of a future where urban living is clean, green and techno-geeky and where Shanghai is the centre of the universe.

Like the Oriental Pearl Tower, which symbolised all that was futuristic in 1990s Shanghai, the flying saucer shape of the Expo performance centre is destined to grace postcards and web pages as the new, new face of Shanghai.

Change is more than skin-deep: the Shanghai government has been renovating residents' attitudes as well – part of what it calls a “spiritual civilisation” campaign.

Some of the 170,000 Expo volunteers have been formed into behavioural adjustment squads. They stand at busy metro stations urging people to stand to the right on escalators; they discourage spitting, queue-jumping, pushing and shouting – all well-loved Shanghainese habits.