Only when the integration of the Yangtze River Delta breaks through the Shanghai metropolitan area, can China' s grand strategy be quickly transformed into a huge action by the people, enterprises and government. Comparing the Yangtze River Delta region with the Tokyo metropolitan area, after a variety of system trade-offs, this article puts forward three basic conditions for delimiting the Shanghai metropolitan area. It is envisaged that the Shanghai metropolitan area will be composed of "one dragon and seven tigers". After analyzing the radiation effects of Shanghai’s international metropolis and metropolitan area for more than 20 years, this article believes that the integration of Shanghai metropolitan area can make up for the “siphoned” flow of people in the past in the urbanization centered on metropolises and even double the population of these small towns, making the population size in some places even larger than the existing resident population. This is conducive to bringing a huge real estate market, elderly care and health care market, and consumer market, attracting more emerging and large entities that are constrained by land space in Shanghai to seek greater development space in small cities in the metropolitan area. The integrated development of the Shanghai metropolitan area will surely cause and activate the development of new dynamism in the entire metropolitan area. And their competition and cooperation will inevitably generate new huge energy to promote economic and social development.
