COLUMN ONE : Reliving Mao’s Bad Old Days : The Cultural Revolution was a brutal decade most wanted to forget. Now, middle-aged urbanites, including ex-Red Guards, feed an odd nostalgia industry that includes the ballet, theme restaurants.

The new three-level restaurant on one of the major avenues here is unusual by any measure.

Outside, limousines and imported luxury cars vie for parking places. Inside, private dining rooms are decorated to look like rustic log cabins and the menu boasts proudly of “peasant fare.” However, the prices are definitely upper-class. White wine and imported German beer are offered to help wash down the northern-style sauerkraut and flat jia chang bing bread.

Under posters of the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung exhorting the masses, successful businessmen and senior government officials--beepers riding high on their fleshy hips--tack their calling cards on cork bulletin boards framed in rough-hewn pine. Their hope is to locate former comrades with whom they served in the Red Guards or sweated beside in rural work camps during China’s turbulent Cultural Revolution.

Until only recently, the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution was a decade most Chinese wanted to forget. It was a time of mass political persecution, brutal dislocations and the hysterical Maoist cult of personality.

Most of China’s present-day top leaders, including 89-year-old Deng Xiaoping, suffered at the hands of Red Guard militants whipped into a frenzy by the infamous Gang of Four under Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. Millions of college-age Chinese--the country’s best and brightest--were deprived of formal educations and dispatched to the remote countryside to “learn from the peasants.”

Lately, however, Beijing and other Chinese cities have been swept up in a strange wave of nostalgia for the infamous period.

For the first time since 1976, for example, the famous Cultural Revolution-era ballet, “The Red Detachment of Women,” featuring gun-toting ballerinas in toe shoes, has been revived and staged in more than 50 cities.

Recently, in Beijing, the two-hour ballet depicting the political awakening and salvation of a peasant girl brutalized by a vicious landlord on Hainan Island was performed before an appreciative, mostly middle-class audience in a high-tech new theater owned by the business arm of the People’s Liberation Army.

But the most enthusiastic response, say officials with the Central Ballet of China, has been in smaller cities outside the cynical Chinese capital.

Ballet director Zhao Ruheng said the performances often outdraw pop stars, even in the most capitalism-smitten cities of Guangdong province in southern China.

“Many people in the audience are in tears,” said Zhao, who danced in the original ballet for Mao’s wife.

There are three reasons for the ballet’s popular acceptance, explained Zhao, wearing jeans, green striped sweater and Reebok shoes during an interview at the ballet’s headquarters in the Xuanwu district of the capital:

“First of all, people in their 40s have a vivid personal memory of the music and the performances. They are thinking nostalgically, happy to come back again to what they had seen before. The next generation comes because it is curious, having read books and seen pictures about ‘The Red Detachment of Women.’ Finally, young kids like it because of the fighting and action.”

One explanation for the Cultural Revolution nostalgia mood is tied to the dizzying pace of China’s growth in recent years.

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In rapidly developing urban China, city dwellers who leave town for six months are stunned by the changes that take place in their absence. Entire blocks of new high-rise apartments and hotels pop up where traditional courtyard homes once stood. Some people here, even those orchestrating the changes, appear to need the comfort of a nostalgic glance back at the days of Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman steering a more austere and regulated course.

Another explanation, offered by popular comic actor Jiang Kun, who spent eight years in the northern countryside during the Cultural Revolution, is that many of those “sent down” to other regions developed a fondness for the place where they served and now, in their middle age, have the time to recall and savor.

Jiang, 43, is the author of a famous 1978 satire set in a photo studio in which customers were required to recite slogans of Chairman Mao before they could have their pictures snapped.

“I went to the Northeast in 1968 and stayed there for eight years,” Jiang said. “Frankly speaking, every one of us tried to leave as soon as we got there. But when we finally could leave, we were reluctant. To us, the soil of the Northeast had its peculiar charm.”

This is also true of celebrated Chinese cinematographers Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, whose early works sympathetically portray lives of the peasants in terribly poor Shaanxi province, where both men were sent during the Cultural Revolution.

In a recent interview, Chen, director of the sweeping epic “Farewell My Concubine,” now showing in American cities, said only two periods interest him as an artist: the between-the-wars Nationalist period and the Cultural Revolution.

In an attempt to tap into this widespread sentiment among China’s elite and exploit it commercially, three restaurants opened recently in Beijing, each with Cultural Revolution themes and heavy doses of Mao memorabilia.

The Black Earth Inn, the expensive three-level restaurant on Hepingli Avenue, caters to veterans of Cultural Revolution “re-education” duty in the remote forests of Heilongjiang province.

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“In those years our sweat was sprinkled on the Great Northern Wilderness; today we meet again in the Black Earth Inn,” says a wallposter on one side of the restaurant. Customers write the numbers of their Heilongjiang division and work units on the business cards they tack on the walls. Restaurant owner-operator Yang Zhifan also has displays of Mao buttons and sells T-shirts emblazoned with the Black Earth Inn slogan.

Yang is only 30, too young to have participated in the Maoist “learn from the peasants” campaign. But he has found “serving the people” highly lucrative for him and his two partners. Interviewed during a busy lunch hour, Yang said that on Oct. 20, the restaurant set a record of 400 customers, each paying at least $5 a head for their peasant food--this in a country where a typical working-class lunch usually costs no more than 50 cents.

Several customers carried cellular phones. One group of young, stylishly dressed Taiwanese diners, who arrived in a convoy of black limousines, said the restaurant had been recommended by mainland friends as a hip new place in the Chinese capital.

That the sons and daughters of the Taiwan-based Kuomintang (Nationalist) movement now dine amiably in a restaurant evoking the memory of the Cultural Revolution--in which anyone with the slightest historical connection to the Kuomintang was horribly persecuted--is one of the many startling ironies of present-day China.

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In fact, the customers in the nostalgia restaurants are more likely to be the perpetrators of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution than its victims. Foreign scholars estimate that as many as 400,000 people died or were killed during the turmoil. It is unlikely that the physicians who were forced to sweep streets or the musicians forced to abandon their instruments will ever develop an appetite for the Cultural Revolution theme restaurants and the Mao-kitsch decor of the Black Earth Inn.

At the slightly more modest but equally popular Laosanjie Restaurant--the name describes the middle- and high-school classes of ‘67, ’68 and ‘69, which were the first sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution--owner Zhu Kunnian seeks a more eclectic mix of former Red Guards and forced urban exiles.

Murals painted on the front windows of the restaurant, next to a medical instruments factory in the city’s eastern district, depict scenes from Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Yunnan and Heilongjiang provinces--all places where city youth were sent by Mao for “re-education.”

The menu features some peasant dishes, such as corn bread and steamed rice with sorghum. But it also includes an item listed as Educated Youths Reunion Platter, which would have been pure fantasy for Cultural Revolution veterans stuck in the remote countryside. Its deluxe ingredients include shrimp, sea slug, squid, mushrooms, red peppers, pineapple, tomato, corn and bitter melon.

Unlike his counterpart at the tonier Black Earth Inn, Zhu, 46, a stocky, short-haired man sporting an ersatz Rolex watch, is a veteran of five years in the countryside after being sent to Shaanxi province in 1968.

“I worked as a farmer from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m.,” he said, “I lived in a storage shed. I learned about the most basic, poorest life of the Chinese people.”

Zhu said he opened the restaurant six months ago after calculating the enormous profit potential of the Cultural Revolution generation.

“In all of China,” he said, his dark eyes glistening, “17 million young people went to the countryside. That means 17 million mothers and fathers. And these 17 million mothers and fathers had at least 17 million children.” He said he plans to open branches of his restaurant in Sichuan and Henan provinces and Shanghai. Each restaurant will have the same Maoist motif, with posters of the Great Leader and wallposters of his most famous slogans. One, in Henan, will be partially financed by the local government.

One diner on a recent afternoon did not seem to be overly amused by the thematic gimmickry.

“If you want to attract customers these days you have to have a theme,” said Zhang Yutang, a veteran of two years of countryside duty in Inner Mongolia, gazing coolly at the slogans and dangling strings of garlic and red peppers on the walls.

This skepticism, however, did not keep Zhang, cultural director of an after-school child-care center, and many others from coming.

The Cultural Revolution nostalgia craze appears to have more to do with affluent, middle-aged Chinese recalling their youth than any renaissance of sympathy for Mao-cult communism.

“None of the people who frequent these restaurants and recall their life in the countryside with fondness is willing to go back and live there as a peasant again,” observed Jung Chang, author of the best-selling book “Wild Swans,” which recounts her experiences during the Cultural Revolution.

“That option,” she said, pausing emphatically in an interview in a Beijing hotel, “is wide open but none of them want to do it. It is a kind of harmless, gentle nostalgia from afar.”

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But that does not mean that the trend is entirely devoid of political emotion. As Zhang, the day-care cultural program director, spoke calmly of the hardships he endured in Inner Mongolia (“Heavy snow blocked our way. No hot water to drink . . . “) a voice boomed from another table at the Laosanjie Restaurant.

“That generation,” said the voice, “is the one that loved the Motherland. It was loyal to the Motherland.”

During a two-to-three-year period in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, moral education in the land was handed over to China’s youth, producing a form of mass teen-age tyranny. Mao, realizing his mistake, diffused the youth dictatorship by, among other things, ordering the teen-agers to the country to learn from peasants. But for many young rebels of the day, the initial years were an unforgettable, heady experience.

Popular novelist Wang Shuo, 35, author of 40 books about the gritty street life of Beijing, argued in a recent interview that one of the main factors of the nostalgia trend is middle-age people longing for the freedom they felt in the days when young people, rallying to Mao’s call, directed purges against their parents and elders.

One of Wang’s novels concerns some very young Chinese city kids who, like the author, got caught up in the excitement and power of the Cultural Revolution. “Ferocious Beasts” is being made into a movie starring heartthrob actor Jiang Wen.

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The film, renamed “The Sunshine Days,” seems destined to become China’s version of “The Big Chill,” as it traces the lives of the young Red Guards from the Cultural Revolution to their present-day bourgeois ways.

“The film is called ‘The Sunshine Days,’ ” author Wang said, “because we were then (during the Cultural Revolution) 14 or 15 years old and every day was a clear day. We had no worries. We were carefree. The Cultural Revolution attacked all the old farts. No one could discipline us. I think it was the most free time in my entire life. Our parents, teachers and the once-respected older generation were all attacked and brought down. Furthermore, their repulsive things--customs, private life, mistakes, secrets--were all exposed. I thought it was great.”