CHINA: THE GIANT AWAKENS : Documentary : Lifetime of Change in a Dozen Years : * Journalist returns to find a far more colorful landscape. Lock-step discipline is out, individualism is in--to a point.

When I left here in 1981, the city was known to most of the world as Peking, and Chinese friends all seemed to be saving for distant dreams: color television sets and sewing machines. When I returned for the first time to Beijing one polluted afternoon this spring, the hot ticket items were portable telephones and air conditioners.

I had left a serene, monochromatic China, a universe not only committed to an ideology but also palpably different from most of the rest of the world because of it. I returned to awesome vitality and dynamism, to riotous color and excitement by the bushel.

While I was away, China had grown up--and out--to become a booming Third World country. It has the same superpower pretensions as ever, but now they are based less on ideology than on newcomer economic strategies adapted, like the politics, from Western sources.

I have lived on three continents since leaving China 12 years ago. In the interim, the Chinese capital has become, at least superficially, one of the world’s shiny places.

In the old Beijing, I lived in a Russian-built hotel called the Qianmen, where the drapes were red velvet, the furniture was ‘50s clunky, hot water was a fitful visitor and Chinese were not allowed. Nowadays, the hotel is all dark wood and mirrors, with an atrium in the lobby. One recent morning, hotel manager Wang Changjun listened to my reminiscences with the polite bemusement of an astronaut summoned to tea with Rip Van Winkle.

“Now, most of our guests are Chinese from the provinces,” he said. “We prefer them, in fact, because they spend more in our restaurants and shops than foreigners.”

Wang thinks there were nine hotels for foreigners in 1981; there are now more than 100, many of them luxury palaces built in partnership with investors from then-off-limits places like Taiwan.

New construction, including thousands of high-rise office buildings and apartment houses, has overhauled the face of urban China as it rushes to catch up with the rest of the world.

There is heady mental change as well. The party’s not over, heaven knows: There are now 52 million card-carrying members of the Communist Party, and uncounted thought police are ever ready to prune serious dissidence: There are thousands of political prisoners in Chinese jails.

Still, lock-step discipline is out. Individualism is in. Nobody calls anybody “comrade” anymore. “The East is red!” ideologues once shouted. More important for success nowadays is to be well-read.

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The times are thrilling. And unsettling.

“Ten years ago, life was easier for many people because everybody understood the rules,” said Wang Gangyi, deputy editor of the English-language China Daily. “A person’s work unit was the center of his life. Now man as an individual has his own values. We are in a transition period in which people believe in everything, and yet in nothing.”

I gawked like a hayseed wherever I went in China last month. But I was reassured to learn that I was not the only one.

“Shanghai has changed more in the last 10 years than in the rest of my lifetime,” said Chen Genbao, 60-year-old chief reporter for the newspaper Wen Hui Bao.

“For 20 years,” said 52-year-old historian Sun Zhaiwei, “I rode my bicycle through Nanjing every day. Its face didn’t change, its pulse didn’t change. Now, the pulse is racing and the face has some new feature every day.”

In their global context, the changes I saw are breathtaking. Think about this: There are five Communist countries left today. Four of them are economic dodos: Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba. The fifth, China, is growing faster than any other country on earth.

“In 1981, I went to school in Hawaii for a year. I came back here and saw little change. We seemed 50 years behind. In 1992, I went back to Hawaii: It seemed about the same. All the dramatic changes had happened here,” said Wang at the China Daily.

And change has only begun. More than 100 high-rises are in prospect for the downtown area of Nanjing alone, said Vice Mayor Zhong Yahui, a one-man chamber of commerce. Across the Huangpu River from the old heart of Shanghai, a whole new city is rising on what was farmland of the Pudong district. It is designed for 2.5 million people by 2020, but it will probably be full long before then, Shanghai city planner Lin Weiming told me at his office.

If China regained its color in the years I was away, it also lost much of its mystery. Austerity and off-putting uniformity symbolized by Mao jackets and baggy pants are as dead as the Cultural Revolution. China’s women, particularly, seem to be enjoying belated new times.

“It is a great joy to be able to stroll through the streets with money in your pocket looking at clothes you might want to buy,” said Hao Wei, a 24-year-old secretary in Shanghai. It floored me that modish, well-coiffed women are hardly rarer on the streets of China’s cities today than they are in Italy.

Cities like Beijing and Shanghai of course will always be sui generis products of their history: One stern, monumental, imperial, governmental; the other a liberal port with a strong foreign flavor bred to industry and to commerce.

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When I first knew these Chinese icons, they had both been essentially closed to outsiders, particularly Americans, for three decades. From the ruins of war, they became stern bastions of puritanical communism. Then they were convulsed by ideological madness in communism’s name during the tear-it-all-down Cultural Revolution.

Beijing and Shanghai were both colorless outposts of ideology in 1980; cities whose personae had been engulfed by the sere demands of a utopian, unproductive political screed. Beijing, in particular, seemed a forbidden city, a cold, formal place ruled by a gerontocracy of 1940s revolutionaries locked in giant stone palaces.

It was Deng Xiaoping then, and it is Deng Xiaoping today. But it is a different Beijing and a different China.

Today, China’s capital and the nation’s most storied port are vibrant, Third World cities en route to becoming international metropolises. I have met their on-the-make cousins in Sao Paulo, Seoul, Mexico City, Jakarta, Istanbul.

China is China, more than one-fifth of humankind. Still, I think it now fits within the authoritarian model of rapid development with countries as disparate as South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Stroessner’s Paraguay or Pinochet’s Chile.

In my day, Beijing and Shanghai seemed time-forgotten--Asian Havanas--isolated, insular, almost innocent. In their backwardness, though, there was somehow also a certain majesty, the lingering pride of travelers on a voyage of conviction. This time around I found them known, and knowing.

If they lacked the glitz of big cities outside China a decade ago, they also lacked the dross: beggars, prostitutes, street crime, traffic. No more.

It was a long march, but China has shed, for good, I think, the expectation of rising revolution. Today, it is embarked on a revolution of rising expectations. It journeys with the same dreams, and a similar set of new problems, as every other Third World country in search of First World material plenty.

In my day, traveling between Beijing and Hong Kong seemed not only a change of countries, but also of centuries. Today it is merely a question of rapidly narrowing degree. The only thing to choose today between big hotels in Hong Kong and those on what used to be called the mainland is that the ones in China are much cheaper.

One afternoon in my Shanghai hotel room, just for the hell of it, I punched in an access code, a credit card number, an American 800 number, and, lickety-split, a computer masquerading in a woman’s voice reported the balance of my mutual fund account in Denver. Try that from Rome sometime.

China’s streets have always been full, but when I lived there, street life was as sterile as the people were drab. Now, open late every night, there are mom-and-pop street restaurants and 90 sidewalk clothing stalls across the street from the Qianmen Hotel.

City fathers in Beijing inveigh against food stands and peddlers blocking sidewalks across the city, but who’s to hear in the torrid national chase of the almighty yuan? In one blocks-long Beijing sidewalk clothing market that could almost be a Middle Eastern bazaar, more than 400 Chinese merchants wholesale cheap textiles to foreign traders, haggling with rough-cut Mongolians and galumphing Russians in something like English.

Hands down, the most heartening aspect of the changes I saw was that so many Chinese seem to be participating in them. With no more restrictions, the old foreigner’s shops and the glitzy new shopping malls are jammed with local folk. Most look, but some buy.

And it is down-home Chinese, not foreigners, who flock to California Beef Noodle King USA, the invention of a Chinese American that people say is the country’s biggest chain of fast food restaurants.

“She wore blue velvet. . . ,” spun the piped-in music at one bright plastic-and-glass coffee shop in downtown Beijing that offers “spaghetti like mama made it . . . with a hearty serving of chicken a la king.” Not many Italians come, but lots of Chinese. I watched two of them master their first cheeseburger. She nudged aside the top of the roll, picked up the rest with her chopsticks and attacked it from the side. He, a spearfisherman, impaled the burger with chopsticks through the top, lifted the quivering mass into the air and went resolutely to work. “ . . . I can still see blue velvet through my tears.”

In a Nanjing department store, I couldn’t believe the number and variety of bicycles for sale to all comers. In my day, bikes were rationed. Now, old-standby black-and-whites like the Forever brand compete with a dazzling variety of newcomers like the slick-looking Gold Lion in soft lilac.

Bikes don’t cut it, though, among new breed yuppie Chinese business leaders. You are what you wear. Italian suits, Swiss watches and a portable telephone for choice. And no wannabe tycoon leaves home without his Great Wall Mastercard.

“You can buy anything you want in Shanghai today if you have money--and many people have money,” reporter Chen told me in the top-floor restaurant of his paper’s new office tower.

Shanghai factory worker Lu Jianzhua, 31, is doing fine, thanks, having traded up to a big color TV from a tiny black-and-white. Beijing Construction supervisor Zhang Fengshou is saving for a music system. Nanjing Prof. Sun Zhaiwei thinks about home improvement.

On a national level, China’s boom is not without peril, both for the inflation it has brought and for the disparities of income it is producing. The manipulators who ride the wave of Chinese-style capitalism are spurting ahead. Salaried workers who pedal daily to government jobs are better off in absolute terms but falling behind relatively.

Worse, the cities and the coast are getting richer but an ominous gap is growing between them and the rest of a country where 800 million people live in still-backward rural areas.

At the Jiangning commune I visited in the countryside outside Nanjing, young women make TV components and sew dress shirts for export as part of windfall assembly industries that are welcome newcomers to rural China.

The workers earn about a dollar a day at official rates--half that at the black market rate at which the economy turns. They are lucky ones. Tens of millions, nay hundreds of millions of rural Chinese, still await the first whiffs of prosperity.

In Shanghai, officials told me that 13 million official residents have been joined by about 2 million people who have filtered in from the countryside in search of work. Nationwide, the floating population is said to be 100 million. Outside every big city railroad station people sit with bundles, waiting for something good to happen.

“I’ll do anything to make money. I’d settle just to fill my belly,” said a 27-year-old woman from Henan near Beijing’s main terminal. She looked like she meant it.

For four decades, China avoided a typical Third World flood to the cities because it was a tightly controlled police state that required official permission to change residence. If you moved without consent you couldn’t get a ration card: no rice, no oil, no coal, no cotton, no milk.

We learned about rationing early in our stay in Beijing when, after dutifully joining the long queue at a store near the hotel, we tried to buy a quart of milk and found it was rationed. Now, anybody with a few cents can buy what its salesmen proclaim to be “low cholesterol” yogurt.

This spring, China quietly scrapped the last vestiges of rationing. From that instant, it became infinitely more difficult to control the movement of people. That new fact of national life could prove as potentially important for China’s social and political future as the end of rationing is a tribute to its economic success.

Most things have changed since I lived in China. Some haven’t. It is still a dictatorship.

An early reminder comes on the inbound airplane: The cabin crew gathers up all foreign newspapers, lest they spread thought infection. Then, on their way to Immigration, passengers file past big banners promising, “A More Open China Awaits 2000 Olympics.” Yesterday once more.

For me, simple evidence that the new Open China is steadily undermining the old Closed China came when I realized that copies of those same confiscated foreign newspapers are for sale in Beijing hotels. TV satellite dishes on sale in private markets everywhere I went would lead me to bet on the Opens against the Closeds in the long run. But I suspect that there are many anxious chapters still to write before the essential contradictions between China’s old politics and its new economics are ironed out.

Journalism is easier to commit in China than it was in my time--there are real, live facts for one thing--but visiting reporters still work with minders and must make interview requests in advance.

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All of mine dealing with social or economic change were approved. The one that contemplated a visit to Beijing University to meet students and professors was refused. Too close to the anniversary of the Tian An Men Square crackdown, colleagues told me.

A fellow reporter, Australian Tony Walker, who worked in Beijing when I was there, returned earlier this year for a new posting after nine years in Cairo.

“You have to pinch yourself, the change is so great. Mind you, though, a lot of it is as otherworldly as ever; nouveau riche draped in kilos of gold, hair-lotion salesmen becoming overnight millionaires,” Walker mused over lunch at a high-in-a-skyscraper Cantonese restaurant not far from Tian An Men. “I guess the greatest change is in personal relationships. It is possible now to have candid conversations with Chinese.”

Amen. In the course of my wanderings, I came across three young Chinese who said they had survived Tian An Men. All three were a lot blunter than any Chinese I had ever talked with about politics.

And they all said essentially the same thing: Now is the time to make money, not politics. One, wearing the jacket and tie uniform of a would-be businessman, said he had left the giant square when the shooting started and has never looked back.

“What greater lesson do we need?” he asked rhetorically. “My friends and I don’t even talk about politics anymore. There’s no use. Money, that’s what we want.”

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Perhaps one day, power, substance and national meaning will come out of the barrel of a checkbook. (See Chairman Mao, turning slowly in his grave.) For now, though, I think of China as a land spiritually adrift.

Communism was at least something to believe in. But now what? As the country increasingly commits itself to the pursuit of the almighty yuan, I see the risk that China will become a hollow, culture-less place, yawing emptily between revolutionaries’ caves and rich man’s strongbox.

Editor Wang at the China Daily thinks I’m wrong. In development, he promises, China will “write her own book,” building a society in which “the advantages of individualism are balanced against the importance of collectivism--the advantage of a group.”

In my valedictory story in 1981, I said that as long as China enjoyed political stability it would experiment economically, moving ever further from classical Marxist economics. The experiments that worked, I said, would be dubbed Communist. Those that failed would be denounced as capitalist.

China has gone long beyond that by now. Ideology is now vestigial. Economic pragmatism is well-established, successful, infectious.

Now, at last, in an epochal burst of energy, the Chinese genie is out of the bottle. So far out, I’d say, that nothing will ever be able to get it back in. No way.