Good night shots can be a challenge. The biggest factor, for me anyway, is to take the picture at dusk. This allows you to get good lighting and detail without the artificial lights washing out.
Here are some examples:
This one was a six second exposure. There was enough light to do a one second exposure, but I had upped to F-stop (f8) so I could bring out more detail in the smaller objects.
I almost ran out of light with this shot. Again, my shutter speed was 8 seconds and my F-stop was set to f6.3.
Here is a good example of a dusk shot. A very clear night and a lot of internal light can help. The exposure here was 2.5 seconds, and the F-stop was set to f7.1
Vancouver has a lot of cloud cover which can work for you rather than against. The city lights bounce of the clouds giving off artificial light in to the sky. It will also give you a great cloud movement effect against the stationary buildings. The trick is to get the shot at dusk. Here is an example of the shot after dusk. As you can see the lights are washed out. It would have been a great shot had I managed to take it earlier.
30 second exposure. F-stop was at f10
I don't want to bog down this thread with photos of Shanghai, so I'll stop now. Hopefully this will help some of you get the best night shots possible.