A World of Change in China : In Place of Dreary Lodgings and Drab Food Are Gleaming Hotels and a Liberated Cuisine

Before returning to China for the first time in four years, I stopped over in Hong Kong last fall. The then-general manager of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel there, Gian Carlo Balanieri, gave me a preview of what I was about to see. “Michelangelo would be right at home if he came to China today,” he said. “There’s more marble in the new hotels of China than there is in Carrara!”

Well, not quite, but damned close.

The Chinese have given a very high priority recently to providing luxurious surroundings and excellent food for travelers bearing coveted foreign currencies (the U.S. dollar is still the standard of value). Since marble represents the height of luxury to them, they have decked out all their new hotels in it, inside and out.

Every lobby, indeed every restroom, is a gleaming grotto. The lobby of The Palace in Beijing, owned largely by the Chiefs of Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, run by the upscale Peninsula chain and touted by China’s government travel agency as “the best hotel in China,” even boasts a four-story marble waterfall. Crystal cataracts tumble from floor to floor in the lobby atrium.

Only four years ago, traveling in the People’s Republic was a test of strength, nerve and patience. But having visited several cities recently--Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing and Haikou, on the resort island of Hainan, among them--I found the pattern substantially changed. Travel in China can now be a pleasure . . . and the food can be wonderful.

Under the slogan “Visit China 1992,” Beijing exerted itself strenuously to attract tourists. Last year, about 6.25 million visitors came in organized groups, and the Chinese government reported in June that a record 37 million foreigners visited China in 1992, up from 31 million in 1988. (Many of these “foreigners” are residents of Hong Kong and Macau who cross the border casually and for brief stays, as they did before the Communists came to power.)

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Experiencing a roughly 25% annual growth in tourism since 1978 (except for the post-Tian An Men years, 1989 and 1990), China had difficulty providing adequate facilities to meet the demand. The recent mushroom-like sprouting of hotels has gone a long way toward solving tourist housing problems, although traveling in China is still not an experience for the fainthearted. Visiting the vast country can be an adventure, which may well be an inducement to the jaded traveler.

On this trip, my first since 1988 (the year before the Tien An Men massacre), I was again struck by the phenomenon I had seen in the past: How contacts with foreigners--even the short visits of often misled tourists--help the Chinese people break down the crumbling walls of totalitarianism.

To the Chinese, the mere presence of tourists they meet, however glancingly, testifies to China’s gradual opening. New hotels require an open door for foreign managers and foreign goods. Tourists themselves require not only transportation and accommodation, but information. They need guides, waiters, receptionists, bellhops and chamber maids who speak a foreign language (usually English) and thus learn foreign ways.

It is, as the Communists now know, impossible to open up just a little. The government-controlled press periodically rails against “spiritual pollution by foreign bourgeois ideas,” and “foreigners’ attempting to foster a peaceful transition to capitalism.” But the old bosses can do little. They cannot block the development of the country that now boasts one of the world’s fastest economic growth rates.

So the leaders strive to stimulate development, with its unavoidable foreign contacts, while preserving authoritarian rule. That balancing act can go on just so long. Controls over independent thinking and exchange of information are already fraying; the provinces are asserting their autonomy. Every tourist visit aids that process. Those Americans who are deterred from visiting China by the horror of Tian An Men, or the continuing campaign to expunge dissidents, might bear this in mind.

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I traveled by train, car, airplane and ship for a fair sampling of what is to offer. The cruise vessel on which I lectured provided a remarkable contrast to the China outside the porthole. The ship was, of course, a peripatetic womb, but, ironically, it was not as luxurious as some of the new hotels.

Recent changes in China are marked. Not only is the little world of the tourist utterly altered, but the life of the Chinese people is also much improved. The countryside of Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong, has been transformed by the new prosperity, as have coastal cities like Fuzhou and Xiamen in Fujian province, where money and talent from Nationalist Chinese Taiwan are heavily invested. I spent most of my time in areas along the China coast, where foreign presence and investment is greatest and daily life is today much better materially than it has been for many decades.

The change in the cuisine is nearly miraculous. As in much of the world, the gray hand of Communism had made Chinese restaurants dreary and meals anything from unpleasant to disgusting.

But today, the ordinary tourist, so often fobbed off elsewhere, is very well fed. Satisfyingly, the people of China are themselves obviously better fed and better dressed. In the more prosperous cities, modish young women and men stroll in the latest fashions, not baggy Mao uniforms. In Beijing, rapidly multiplying yellow mini-cabs are threatening to overtake the ubiquitous bicycles and trishaws. One no longer feels like a privileged spectator at a real tragedy.

Of course, not everything is wholly changed. Flying on Chinese airlines is still a hair-raising experience. Travel within China by boat or train is always interesting, if sometimes a bit trying. But “soft class,” the Chinese term for first class, is not bad at all.

Another thing that hasn’t changed much: With a few exceptions, the guides of the official China International Travel Service (CITS) are almost as incompetent, unobliging and misinformative as ever. But a guide is no longer obligatory, and the few good ones are happy to act as companions and informants, rather than overseers and propagandists.

Tourist gouging is, if anything, worse. Tourists pay four to ten times as much as Chinese for rail, boat and air tickets. At the Summer Palace outside Beijing, I was directed to a ticket window with a sign reading “Foreign Tourists and Overseas Chinese.” A ticket here cost the equivalent of about $1.65; at all the other windows, which bore signs in Chinese characters, the same ticket cost 33 cents.

Gouging is not as prevalent among individuals as it is on the part of officialdom and state-owned facilities. But in Shanghai I paid 80 yuan, then about $13, for four small bottles of Perrier, the local water being so heavily chlorinated against hepatitis as to make even the tea undrinkable.

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Yet the food was excellent at the revolving restaurant atop new Ocean Hotel in Shanghai’s Hongkou district, which lies north of the Garden Bridge spanning Suzhou (Soochow) Creek, made famous in 1937 by a news photo showing Chinese refugees swarming across it into the International Settlement to escape Japanese invaders.

Shanghai food, like Shanghai itself, is eclectic. The cuisine blends several regional styles, with particular emphasis on seafood. My wife, Moira, and I ate sauteed eels rich with garlic and freshly chopped spring onions; baby shrimp with fresh peas, and small steamed dumplings. In addition to the Perrier, we drank Tsingtao beer from Tientsin, since Shanghai’s own Seagull beer is hardly more palatable than the water.

The stark modern grandeur of the ice-white marble lobby of the Ocean Hotel, which is patronized chiefly by overseas Chinese visitors, contrasts with the old quarter in which it is set. From the revolving restaurant, where we were served by waiters in bow-ties and waitresses in long, slit-skirted cheongsams, we looked down on an area that had originally been the American Settlement. Beneath us also lay the Ward Road Jail, where Americans and Britons were held by the Japanese during the World War II. Close to the jail, we saw the tenements of the Jewish ghetto, which the Japanese had a little reluctantly created to placate their Nazi ally.

South of Soochow Creek, in the center of the city, a pale two-story band of shops, restaurants and promenades has now defaced the river-side esplanade called the Bund, with its jagged 1920s skyline. New buildings are rising everywhere: banks, apartments, offices, hotels, department stores and shopping centers. Across the Huangpu River, the factory and slum district called Pudong is scheduled for massive redevelopment. Nonetheless, Shanghai today recalls the old Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan, the wickedest and the most prosperous city of East Asia.

With wide-scale economic liberalization, the streets are once again crammed with pedestrians shopping or showing off their new designer finery. If you have the money, there is almost nothing you cannot buy in Shanghai. Foreign-made pharmaceuticals are an exception, as we discovered when we went looking for a simple anti-fungal ointment that apparently has no Chinese-made equivalent. Fine jade miniatures are in relative abundance. But no ointment.

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The old ways still prevail in the nooks and crannies of Shanghai, China’s largest city. Shop signs are spanking new, often gold-leafed or shiny with reflective paint. But behind the glitter, ancient squalor lingers. A kindly Customs guard at a gate where our ship docked let me telephone a friend from his little office. The hut was filthy, the glass on the desk cracked in four places.

Squalid is not the adjective to apply to new complexes financed with foreign funds. The Shanghai Centre, an apartment/shopping/business development where most Americans diplomats live, is run by American entrepreneurs (telephone calls from here go through Atlanta, Ga.). I saw only the lobby (marble-clad, of course) of the Portman Shangri-La Hotel here, but I was again impressed at the service and courtesy, qualities for which Shanghai was once celebrated.

After the horror of staying at a hotel like the Jinjiang (opposite the old French Club) some 15 years ago--even after the modified discomfort of the old Peace Hotel (once the Cathay, where Noel Coward is reputed to have written a play)--it is pleasant to find Shanghai again aspiring to the silken service that makes East Asia’s hotels the world’s best.

The new Peace Hotel is an Art Deco gem just behind the Bund, but it is now brighter, cleaner and, somehow, sparkling, though with a subdued light. There, what must be the world’s oldest tea dancing ensemble still pours out the hits of the ‘20s and ‘30s, which were retired during the puritanical years of Mao Zedong’s rule.

Shanghai’s Sheraton Hua Ting typifies the combined business-tourist hotel, a genre of which it was the forerunner. With 1,080 rooms and 40 suites, it is not cozy, but with rooms furnished in king-size or two double beds, it is undeniably comfortable. Add the usual indoor swimming pool, health center, business center and floodlit tennis courts--not to mention Luigi’s Italian Restaurant--and it is not unlike other first-class hotels across the world.

Outside the sleek, hyper-modern building, old men and women still go through the languorous movements of traditional Chinese soft boxing, called t’ai chi ch’uan (“fists of the ultimate”). And the teahouse that appears on millions of blue-and-white willow pattern plates still stands at the end of a zig-zag bridge in the old quarter. Shanghai is like New York: You may hate it or you may love it, but you can’t ignore it.

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Some 250 miles up the winding Yangtze River from Shanghai, a nine-hour train ride, is Nanjing (Nanking), which means Southern Capital, as Beijing (Peking) means Northern Capital. It is an historic city that I find a little boring.

Nanjing rose to importance in the 13th Century when the Sung Dynasty, fleeing south before the invading Mongols, set its capital there. Nanjing declined in the 14th Century when the Ming Dynasty moved back to Beijing. In the 19th Century, it was the capital of the Tai Ping Tien Kuo, the Heavenly Kingdom of Surpassing Peace, a regime created by semi-Christian rebels that was eventually put down by the Manchu Dynasty. Early in the 20th Century, Nanjing was the capital of Chiang Kai Shek’s Republic of China, which was conquered by the Communists, who set their capital in Beijing. All in all, an ill-omened city, though some love its dusty streets and the extremes of its climate.

When I visited Nanjing years ago, I stayed at the Nanjing Hotel, which had opened as the Metropole shortly before the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s. It was not much. This time I stayed at the Jinling, a government enterprise and a very pleasant surprise. It is a little spare by the more lavish standards of Shanghai or Beijing, but functioning very well, indeed. After toiling up hundreds of steps to Nanjing’s enormous mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese Republic (who went to high school in Honolulu), the Jinling offered a cool retreat. Even in government hotels, the staff now tries hard to please--and happily accepts tips.

Across the street is the Nanjing Friendship Store, once virtually reserved for foreigners with hard currency, but these days mobbed by Chinese, who find its abundant wares irresistible. Arcades surrounding the Jinling also attract throngs of local shoppers. Go and see them peel notes off rolls of bills big enough to choke a dragon.

This is the new China, where it is one’s duty to get rich. Spending on consumer goods, which have only been available during the last few years, is virtually a civic obligation. Still, cashmere sweaters at $50 to $90 a throw are not bad by anyone’s standards. Happily, the new models do not stretch out of all semblance to the human body after a few wearings, as their predecessors did four years ago.

And food at the Jinling? A wide variety of dishes from the abundant Yangtze Valley is served in its three main restaurants. The real treat, however, is breakfast in the coffee shop, where an array of fruit and dim sum is offered with creamy bean-curd soup, chicken-or fish-flavored rice gruel seasoned with a half-dozen sprinkled ingredients, tang bao (soup dumplings with the soup inside) and long Chinese unleavened bread freshly crisped in oil. You can also have scrambled eggs, if you wish.

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Guangzhou (Canton), the metropolis of South China, is even more high powered than other cities. So, for that matter, is almost all of Guangdong province, whose industry is growing at more than 50% a year (and an overall growth rate of about 20%). The reason: the funds, talent and energy invested by entrepreneurs from Hong Kong, about 90 miles away.

Change is not only quantitative. The government-run Dong Fang (Great Eastern) Hotel was abysmal nine years ago, and grim four years ago. It is now very good. The rooms are not only clean, but comfortable in a slightly fusty, old-fashioned way.

Service is prompt, intelligent and smiling. No longer do charwomen in filthy tunics swish grimy mops around the feet of diners who stay after 7 p.m. To the horror of the heirs of one of the world’s oldest living civilizations, I once exploded as the mop-swingers drenched my feet: “Nowhere in the civilized world do people behave like this!”

Now you can stay as late as you want. In the time of Chairman Mao, politics was in command. Today economics is in command. So the Dong Fang’s eight restaurants stay open until the last patron departs at his leisure--and major demolition jobs are carried out not by machines, but by men (and, often enough, women) swinging sledge-hammers.

In a nation of 1.2 billion, human beings are cheaper. Every year millions of unemployed swarm into prosperous Guangdong looking for work. Those toilers receive, at most, 70 yuan, roughly $11, for a 12-to-14 hour workday, or as little as, say, $1.15, if they are contract laborers. The contractor takes a lion’s cut, as he did in the bad old capitalist days. There are plenty more where this gang of laborers came from--and they know it.

The roads pushing through the delta of the Pearl River toward Hong Kong and Macao are built just as airfields were built for the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Except for miniature cement mixers and a few pneumatic drills, construction methods of the Han Dynasty 2,000 years ago are still in use: Boulders are shifted by men with giant levers, rocks are broken by thousands wielding small hammers, and the fill is tamped down with logs.

For a striking contrast in images, visit Li Gardens, an entertainment complex which occupies an entire city block across the street from the Dong Fang Hotel. Two identical midgets wearing black bow-ties with white shirts stand at the gates. The patrons are young men with money to burn. The doorman of the neon-lit seafood restaurant is a Sikh in full regalia: white turban, blue tunic, jodhpurs and imposing beard. A sign touts K.T.V., Karaoke Television; 28 tanks display live fish and crustaceans.

Guangzhou nonetheless bears the scars of protracted Communist rule, as well of decades of war and civic negligence. Dingy, gritty and gray, the city is also rich in broken window panes and cracked sidewalks. But a boxy shape gleams black amid saplings in Li Gardens: the biggest possible Rolls-Royce, the Winged Victory on the hood glittering in solid gold.

“That,” says one midget, “belongs to the owner.”

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Haikou, on booming Hainan Island in the deep south, appears to be quite simply a city of thieves. The cages that extend across the sidewalk to enclose the entire ground floors of many houses testify to that local propensity, as do the New York-style grills in taxis.

Avoid, by all means, the Overseas Chinese Hot Springs Hotel, where lunch of a few prawns, some noodles and a truly excellent sauteed eel cost us about $30 for two. That is an enormous sum by local standards, more than twice as much as we paid for any meal elsewhere. Of course, overseas Chinese returning to visit the Motherland are expected to be filthy rich--and to scatter their cash like Roman emperors.

Nonetheless, China is obviously still hardly expensive by our standards. And Haikou, where dozens of brick towers are rising as much as 40 or 50 stories before being clad with marble, is a very exciting place. Because of its tolerant laws, it is the Delaware of China; some 5,000 corporations are registered here, most largely operating elsewhere in China.

Haikou also offers the most exciting traffic I have seen in years, more entertaining and more nerve-racking than Paris, or even anarchic Saigon at its worst.

The avenues and boulevards of the well-laid-out city of some half a million, which has sprung up during the past four or five years, are broad. But a tortuous one-way system and drivers’ lack of basic skill, compounds the effrontery they possess in equal measure. Haikou is the only place I have ever ridden in a taxi that began a turn into a narrow street behind another car, but emerged in front.

China is growing very fast, and now is a very good time to visit and witness the energy. Someday the bill will have to be paid for lavish investment and extravagant consumer spending. The government is already trying to cool down the economy, as it did in 1988.

Traveling there can be arduous, since many aspects are not up to Western standards or, are, more precisely, different from our expectations. And the obvious suppression of thought and speech can be very disturbing to outsiders, as well as Chinese.

Nonetheless, almost all contact with the outside world helps a mite toward ameliorating governmental severity. China may never be a democracy--or be as hygienic as California. That, hardly paradoxically, contributes to its fascination.

GUIDEBOOK

Behind the Great Wall of China

Getting there: Hong Kong is the best jumping-off place for China because of its wide range of services and travel agencies. From LAX, Cathay Pacific, United and Delta offer nonstop service to Hong Kong. United has an advance-purchase round-trip fare of $1,150. Beginning Friday, the cost rises to $1,293, the same as with Cathay and Delta.

From Hong Kong, the best way to China is Dragonair, a subsidiary of Cathay Pacific that flies to 13 cities. Chinese airlines--Air China, CAAC and various regional lines--are still iffy.

Although it is becoming easier to travel on your own in China, for first-timers the best way to see the country is on a package tour. Travel within China can be difficult; even experienced tour operators cannot always guarantee hotels and services. Seek out a travel agent or tour operator with several years’ experience, read guidebooks and research your trip well. The quasi-government-run U.S. China Travel Service (212 Sutter St., San Francisco 94108, 800-899-8618 or 415-398- 6627, fax 415-398-6669), affiliated with Hong-Kong based China Travel Service, can arrange customized tours. Tip: Pan Xinliang, the agency’s general manager, suggests that visitors wanting the best food might book tours without meals included and pay meal costs separately, since package tours will likely offer less-than-inspiring tourist fare.

Where to stay:

BEIJING

The Palace (8 Goldfish Lane, Wangfujing, Beijing; reservations 800-223-6800, or from the U.S., telephone 011-86-1-512-8899, fax 011-86-1- 521-9050). Rates: $160 for a double, $180 for a junior suite. The Palace Restaurant’s Sichuan creations are matched only by Taipei’s best.

Great Wall Sheraton Hotel (N. Donghuan Road, Beijing, tel. 800-325-3535 or 011-86-1-500-5566, fax 011-86-1-500-1919 or 011-86-1-500-1938) is the first truly modern hotel in Beijing, hard by the diplomatic quarter. Rates: $105-$210 (plus 15% service charge). Ten restaurants: one with Northern Chinese cuisine, one with French, etc.

NANJING

Jinling Hotel (Xin Jie Kou Square, tel. 011-86- 25-741999, fax 011-86-25-714695), located in the city’s center, was renovated last year. Rates: $100-$110, suites $200-$220.

SHANGHAI

Sheraton Hua Ting (1200 Cao Xi Bei Lu, tel. 800- 325-3535 or 011-86-21-439-1000, fax 011-86-21- 255-0830). Rooms all have international direct-dial telephones and satellite color TVs. Rates: $100, up.

GUANGZHOU

Dong Fang (Great Eastern) Hotel (120 Liu Hua Road, tel. 011-86-20-666-9900, fax 011-86-20- 686-2775). Rates: $60-$170 (suites).

White Swan Hotel (Yang Xiao Peng 1, Shamian Island, tel. 011-86-20-888-6968, fax 011-86-20- 886-1168) stands on a man-made island. Rates: $100-$300; nine restaurants.

Where to eat: (Get your hotel concierge to write the address of non-hotel restaurants in Chinese characters and give this to a taxi driver.)

BEIJING

A number of restaurants offer “authentic Beijing roast duck,” the celebrated dish Peking duck. The Old Duck Restaurant, the Sick Duck Restaurant or, simply, the Duck Restaurant are all fine. Order the truly authentic “roast duck five ways”: first the livers; then pieces of the crisp brown skin rolled in pancakes with strips of cucumber, spring onions and thick plum sauce; then flesh sauteed with bean sprouts; then a gruel of millet and duck, including the fat, and finally a soup made from the carcass.

Dong Lai Shun, just down Goldfish Lane from the Palace Hotel, serves traditional Mongolian food (about $5 a meal) and is popular with Communist Party bosses and corporate executives. The Teo Cheo (Seafood) Restaurant opposite the Palace is also good.

NANJING

The Plum Garden in the Jinling Hotel offers spectacular local specialties (try Nanjing smoked duck). Also good for local dishes is Jiangsu Restaurant at 26 Jinkang Road.

SHANGHAI

The 369 is an old-fashioned Shanghai Restaurant with a name invoking good luck; try the sauteed eels. Gong De Ling, near the Park Hotel, is a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant that serves extraordinary replicas (in appearance and taste) of everything from goose to sausage, mostly made of bean curd. As usual, some of the best food is to be found in the hotels; among them is the revolving restaurant at the Ocean Hotel on Da Ming Street.

GUANGZHOU

Concierges take great delight in pointing unwary foreigners toward specialty restaurants or the animal market, where dogs, cats, spiny anteaters, eagles, raccoons, tortoises and even less-probable beasts are sold for the pot. If you must, try the Shecanguan Snake Restaurant at 43 Jianglan St. or Yehweixiang (Wild Animals) Restaurant at 247 Beijing St. Also the Lion Restaurant, on the lake for centuries, serves imaginative though less-macabre Cantonese food. For more information: Contact the China National Tourist Office, 333 W. Broadway, Suite 201, Glendale 91204, (818) 545-7505.