‘I am a Chinese Yuppie.’

Lucky for Mao that he’s dead.

Or else what happened in Burbank one recent night would have put him under for sure.

The world has changed, say reports from Moscow and Beijing, capitals of what was until recently the People’s Democratic Monolithic Menace.

Perestroika and the new China economic order. Glasnost and toodle-oo Afghans. It appears that capitalism is on a roll, winning converts among those who once were going to bury it. Generations of grim socialists, napping on the express train to the future they thought was theirs, are awakening to find the ghost of Adam Smith at the throttle, chortling about supply and demand.

Still and all, William F. Buckley on peyote would not have conjured up this scene:

There were 42 Chinese functionaries wearing red, white and blue baseball caps bearing the Cadillac emblem, drinking champagne, cheering polo players and mobbing Rambo for an autograph.

Polo? Cadillacs? Rambo?

Yes, indeed. Changes afoot in the big world can be seen in Burbank.

The Chinese, managers of state-owned industries in China, are enrolled in a six-week program at Cal State L.A. aimed at coaching their transformation into capitalist executives. Organize comrades, and struggle valiantly for the ultimate victory of the peoples’ bottom line.

Local Cadillac dealers treated the group to a night at the Equestrian Center watching polo.

Not volleyball or Ping-Pong, games the Chinese know far too well for some Westerners. But polo, a game so aristocratic that beginner’s equipment includes a stableboy, an oat farm and dossiers on all great-grandmother’s boyfriends; a game whose very name is used by advertisers to create an image of wealth and privilege.

Not Chevrolets. Cadillacs. The standard American plutocrats’ car before the plutocrats’ kids stopped buying American cars. A symbol of Wall Street before the money got away.

After a cocktail party, the Chinese took turns sitting in an Allante, Cadillac’s new $56,000 two-seater.

“Is this as good a car as Mercedes? In China we have many Mercedes.”

“Well,” a Cadillac executive replied tactfully, “we are in competition with Mercedes.”

“Ahhhhh,” said several in the group in unison, looking at each other and nodding their heads in new understanding: “Competition.”

The captain of the Los Angeles team, Tom Goodspeed, explained polo to them as “like ice hockey, except on horses.” It was unclear whether they understood what ice hockey was.

Johnny Grant was introduced as “honorary mayor of Hollywood,” an English word they knew.

“Ahhhhh. Hollywood.”

Grant explained that they were not in Hollywood, but if they mounted a horse, they could ride over the nearby mountains to the famous Hollywood sign in a short time. The group looked puzzled at this, probably having heard of the Western American custom of people’s summary justice for horse thieves.

“We do not always laugh in the right place because we do not always understand American joke,” one explained to an American onlooker.

Several passed a question through an interpreter.

“They say they have been to Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm, many other places where they were told the common people were, the working class. They see many very fat people, especially women. Here they were told they would see rich Americans, but here the people are all slim, almost no fat people.

“This seems strange to them. Do rich people get less to eat?”

The American tried to explain expensive health resorts--”fat farms.”

“It costs money not to eat?” one executive asked.

“Ahhhh,” said several in the group, exchanging looks.

America the inscrutable.

The interpreter, Huang Xiaopo, explained that she learned English in a special school, although her studies were interrupted during the Cultural Revolution by the Red Guards.

They persecuted her?

“I was one, of course.”

“It is like the hippies in the West and the generation of 1968 in Paris. Now they are important executives. Then I was Red Guard. Now I am deputy director of the All China Journalists Assn. with thousands of workers.

“I am a Chinese yuppie.”

They watched the polo match wearing the caps the Cadillac people had given them.

“It is a very spirited game,” observed He Yi Zhao, general manager of the New Asia Group Limited of Shanghai, which has 300 hotels and 2,000 restaurants. “We used to have horse racing in Shanghai before the revolution, and I think now maybe we could have it again.”

After the match, the Chinese were told that a fellow spectator had asked to be introduced. Sylvester Stallone’s name rippled through the group in Chinese but did not seem to mean much until the actor appeared.

“Ahhhhhhhhh,” chorused the group.

“RAMBO!”

“Everyone in China know Rambo,” one explained enthusiastically, trying to push into the crowd to get Stallone to autograph his polo program.

“Hide in mud, jump out, killing everybody. Crazy stuff.”

“You were the star of the bloodiest film ever seen in the People’s Republic of China,” Xiaopo said to Stallone with a polite giggle.

As the Chinese headed for the exit, one said to another, practicing his English:

“We are going to the disco. I am so glad we are international now.”