FROM MAO TO NOW : China’s Most Cosmopolitan City Hurtles Into a New Age in Which the Opium of Materialism Has Edged Out the Chairman’s Vision

It was midday on Nanjing Road, busiest street in one of the largest and most rapidly changing cities on the planet. Honks, bells, shouts, rumbles and humanity crowded the sidewalks and street. I was on foot, along with a few million others in the downtown area, and just ahead of me on the sidewalk hunched a young man who had apparently just arrived from the Chinese countryside.

He wore an old Mao jacket and cap--which in itself is enough to set you apart amid the tumult of smart suits and slit skirts that is downtown Shanghai in 1993--and a fresh-off-the-bus expression. A tiny knapsack and bag were slung over his shoulder on a cane, in the same way that generations of Chinese peasants have carried coal and produce. The yuppies and merchants shouldered past him and the neon display signs blazed above in blue and pink, and while I dawdled behind, he moved in a sort of dazed slow motion, paused at a shop window and set down his load on the curb. Then, without a backward glance, he stepped inside to inspect the leather jackets, the fur coats . . . the future.

This is not a scene easily packaged and pitched by tour companies, but it’s exactly what sets this city apart from most of the world. After a notorious history as a European playground in the early 20th Century and a tardy entry into the Chinese economic reform movement of the last 15 years, Shanghai and its estimated population of 13 million are courting tourism and charging into the free-market world with a vengeance that makes the former Soviet states of Eastern Europe look like idle bystanders.

Shanghai is no place for the fragile. The air is so thick with coal dust that some parents outfit their children with tiny surgeon’s masks, and in the continuing boom, environmental damage may get much worse before it gets better. Don’t come to unwind. Come to see a world turning.

Straw-hatted laborers heave up manufacturing plants and Mercedes-Benz dealerships. A massive middle class, salaries plumped by foreign investment, labors six days a week and then floods the shops on the seventh. Erstwhile rural workers arrive daily to look for city jobs. While teachers in Beijing pull down as little as $60 in monthly salaries, tip-taking taxi drivers here say they can easily bring in 10 times that amount. To envision the new Shanghai, picture Manhattan, and then add 5 million bicycle couriers, none helmeted, all running late.

Once there, you can step inside the Shanghai Overseas Chinese department store on Nanjing Road and behold the counter displaying 18 different makes of rice cooker. Or peek through the door of a hair salon. On the day I arrived in China last month, the South China Morning Post reported a new survey finding that Shanghai’s women now earn an average of $90 monthly, and spend more than 20% of it on beauty products.

“It’s the way the U.S. was right after World War II,” said Tom Goldsmith, a Virginian who recently organized an international trade show here. “Everything is in that state where it’s about to blossom, just as it did (in the U.S.) in the 1950s.”

One difference, of course, is that U.S. officials around that time were persecuting suspected friends of communism. Today’s Chinese authorities, on the other hand, are still persecuting suspected friends of democracy--a practice that apparently cost the country its chance to host the 2000 Olympic Games, and a condition of life here that keeps Chinese and visitors alike wondering what might come next.

While wondering, a visitor can stroll along the old, European-built waterfront; step into a Buddhist shrine; watch some of Shanghai’s internationally acclaimed acrobats, or look down on an old billy club (said to have been wielded by European police in the bad old days) under glass in the modest house where Mao Tse-tung and a dozen others convened the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China 72 years ago. Or, this being the new China, you could just go shopping.

Shanghai bloomed late and strangely. Set on China’s coast near the muddy mouth of the Yangtze River, the city endured as a fishing, shipping and textile town for centuries, but didn’t develop a worldly profile until 1842, when Britain defeated the Chinese in the Opium War and pried the port open to European trade.

Within a few years, British, French and Americans had established “settlements” immune from Chinese law. Soon they had their own architectural profile along the waterfront. The Bund, a long, picturesque row of imposing European mercantile buildings, rose on the west bank of the Huangpu River, joined elsewhere in town by gentlemen’s clubs (one of which is now the city library), a horse-racing track (now People’s Park), stylish nightspots, well-stocked department stores and enough brothels to house, by one estimate, 30,000 prostitutes. If God is going to let Shanghai stand, one missionary is said to have lamented, then apologies are owed to Sodom and Gomorrah.

An estimated 60,000 foreigners were residing in Shanghai by the 1930s, principally English, French and Russians fleeing communism, but also Jews fleeing Germany. They lived well, surrounded by Chinese servants, prostitutes, laborers, addicts of the opium imported by the Europeans, and the desperately poor. In her book “In Search of Old Shanghai,” author Pan Ling reports that in 1937 alone, the Municipal Council of Shanghai’s International Settlement collected more than 20,000 corpses from the streets.

Such statistics, especially considered alongside the war damages inflicted by the Japanese here in the late 1930s and early ‘40s, make it not so hard to understand how the communists rose to power in 1949. What may be more surprising is to see that after more than 40 years spent purging Shanghai of its capitalist past and expropriating the revenues from its substantial industrial output, the leaders in Beijing are allowing a new Shanghai to rise that resounds eerily with echoes of the old Shanghai.

The most obvious place to look for pre-revolutionary Shanghai is on the Bund. Now as in the ‘30s, Europeans and Americans can gaze with vague familiarity upon the Big Ben-like clock tower of the old customs house (now a Chinese government operation) and the noble 1926 facade of the former Cathay Hotel. In that striking structure, now known as the Peace Hotel, Westerners gather downstairs nightly to pony up a $5 cover charge and hear the aged gentlemen of the house jazz band thrum and skittle through a repertoire of pre-1949 standards.

The rest of the Bund is more for walking and watching. The looming architecture on Saturday nights is bathed in showy lights, but by day the buildings are unenthrallingly occupied by government agencies and import-export enterprises. The most interesting hours are before the business day begins, when thousands of Shanghainese gather along waterfront Huangpu Park to do their morning t’ai chi ch’uan, and after it ends, when the waterfront promenade turns into a lover’s lane and viewing platform for harbor lights.

Standing on that promenade, I looked for photogenic junks dodging among the many merchant ships, and saw none. What I did see, bristling across the river, was the 135-square-mile Pudong New Area, epicenter of the city’s economic ambitions. Right now its principal features are a tall television tower, a Kent cigarettes sign and innumerable cranes, but if plans announced in 1990 are realized, billions of dollars worth of infrastructure will be laid over the next decade, and as the 21st Century opens, the most important free trade zone and business district in the region will bloom.

The easiest route into the world of Shanghai commerce for a visitor is a long walk down Nanjing Road. Beginning on the Bund at the Peace Hotel, Nanjing Road runs west 26 long blocks. So busy are most of those blocks that pedestrians spill from the sidewalk into traffic lanes, and bicycles are banned.

In the old days, the leading department stores were the Wing On, Sincere, the Sun and Sun Sun. Most of those buildings now carry less evocative titles (Wing On became the Number Ten Department Store), but hundreds of junior competitors nip at their elbows. An Apple computer outlet. A Playboy merchandise store. Benetton. A dozen restaurants, rich with pork, green vegetables and an extensive seafood selection. And outnumbering all other concerns, scores of clothing and fabric stores line Nanjing Road, selling the same goods that China now exports globally.

“Where shopping is a dream, when a dream comes true,” proclaims one store slogan on one block of Nanjing Road. On another, a recently opened furrier has his storefront covered with flowers. A rain slicker fetches $20; a pair of brown shoes, $22; a black leather miniskirt, $60. A pair of high-top Nikes goes for $180. (Genuine name brands and unauthorized knockoffs sit cheek by jowl on Shanghai shelves; the prices make clear which is which.)

All these items are selling in unprecedented volumes to Chinese customers--especially the millions of shirts and jackets with wonderfully incomprehensible English slogans stitched front and back. My favorite: ROSY PROSPECTS ADVANCING AT HIGH SPEED KANGAROO .

As a lackadaisical American shopper who spent little time in the Friendship Stores the government sets aside for foreigners, I found the prices low, the quality middling, and the inventory, beyond the predictable calligraphy scrolls and jade paperweights, not particularly exotic. But after the transformations of the early ‘90s here, who knows what may line these aisles in a year or two?

Westbound browsers on Nanjing Road have a built-in stopping point: They will eventually reach the edge of People’s Park, and a dose of calm. On a cool fall morning, I paid my 40 cents admission and watched several thousand Shanghainese begin their day.

Around a still pond with rock-strewn edges, a graceful man led breathing exercises and ignored the din of construction. Along a display panel, the day’s newspaper was posted, as were photographs of criminals (crime has been rising along with living standards in the new China). One old man in a Mao jacket gently jogged, while two others stood awkwardly, each holding a badminton racquet and gazing up with dismay at an errant shuttlecock lodged in the branches above like a mutant blossom.

The two certain stops on any Shanghai guide’s itinerary are the Jade Buddha Temple and Yu Garden. The Jade Buddha Temple is a rarity in religion-wary China, an 80-some-year-old Buddhist retreat that somehow survived the revolution. The property, a $3 taxi ride north of Nanjing Road, is run by several dozen robed monks, who spend much of their time managing the temple’s heavy tourist traffic.

The featured attraction is a six-foot-tall Buddha carved of a single chunk of jade, set amid jewels, delivered by a monk from Burma in the late 19th Century. To see it, I paid about $2, removed my shoes in an ante room, and shuffled past in woven slippers. The statue smiles like the Mona Lisa. Another Buddha presides downstairs, incense-scented, gold-skinned, 15 feet high and surrounded by smaller figures, flourishes and kneeling Buddhist visitors. Nearby, I met a middle-aged man mourning his mother, now two years dead.

Later that day, I looked for a comparable human dimension in the Yu Garden. I couldn’t find it. The site, a sprawling network of ancient buildings, fish ponds and landscaped grounds is one of the oldest structures in Shanghai; it dates to 1559. The sequence of micro-environments is interesting, but I should have been warned by the banner draped across the major street out front. “China Tourism Shopping Festival,” it said. In far too many of the garden’s ancient rooms, souvenir hawkers lay in waiting. Outside its gateswithin about 20 paces, one steps from the Ming Dynasty into Jeans West. Anyone with the chance should step beyond this and do a little prowling past the laundry lines, porch-sitters and narrow alleys of the nearby Old Town neighborhood, where Chinese families still live in remarkably close quarters.

Another stop taken by almost every tour group is the Shanghai Children’s Palace, where talented children take visitors by the hand, play musical instruments with great dexterity, and behave with impeccable politeness. By the time I reached Shanghai, I’d heard so many accounts of Children’s Palace visits that I felt I’d already been there. I was happy enough to venture instead into the former Frenchtown and enter the home where Mao and his comrades began building the Community Party in 1921.

The brick building, now a modest museum just off Huaihai Road (Avenue Joffre in the old days), stands on a leafy, relatively uncrowded street corner. It’s a little strange to read the bilingual exhibits about European exploitation in the old days, given what now goes on outside the museum doors. It was even stranger to find myself cornered by a platoon of uniformed maritime university students, all about 20 years old, who largely ignored the museum guide’s lecture so that they could meet a couple of Americans. They grinned, groped for English words and unabashedly peered over my shoulder while I scribbled notes on 60-year-old Western atrocities against the Chinese.

In many ways, Shanghai is most inviting by night. The crowds thin, the neon gleams, the pollution is less evident, and immense doings seem to be afoot. One is the nightly performance of the internationally admired Shanghai Acrobatic Theatre--the inexpensive performance runs from a trained elephant to cutlery jugglers and shouldn’t be missed--but one need not have a specific agenda to step into the picture.

Simply find a pedicab after dinner. For a few dollars, a traveler can merge with the blur and flash of the place, while the man up front pumps, coasts, thumbs the ineffectual, incessantly ringing bell on his handlebars, and careens without headlights around clogged corners and through the night traffic. In fact, after covering a mile in a Shanghai pedicab, I see a problem for the legion of Western marketers on their way here: There can’t be a video game on earth as demanding, exhilarating and menacing as the standard commute of a Shanghai bicyclist.

*

It was on the last of my three days in town, after I’d seen most of the sights above, that I fell in step on Nanjing Road behind the young man with the cane and the knapsack. After he stepped into the fur and leather store, leaving his load behind, I stopped and waited to see his next move. Could he be looking for work? Window-shopping? Or beneath his modest costume, had he already started salting away hefty savings, like so many of his neighbors?

I kept waiting with an eye on the knapsack, until it finally dawned on me that I’d lost him, that he might never come back. Just about the last thing you need to make your future in the new Shanghai, I suppose, is an old country knapsack.

GUIDEBOOK

High on Shanghai

Tours: Unless you speak Chinese or have a companion who does, a guided group tour is the most sensible and affordable way to see China. Three veteran operators in China are Pacific Delight Tours (132 Madison Ave., New York 10016; telephone 800-221-7179 or 212-684-7707), InterPacific Tours International (111 East 15th St. at Park Avenue South, New York 10003; tel. 800-221-3594), and Abercrombie & Kent International (1520 Kensington Road, Oak Brook, Ill. 60521; tel. 800-323-7308 or 708-954-2944).

At the least expensive end of the spectrum in 1993 were quick trips such as the eight-day jaunt offered by InterPacific Tours International (Beijing, Shanghai, Xian; air fare from West Coast and all meals included) beginning at $1,695 per person, double occupancy. At the high end lie trips such as the 17-day deluxe tour offered by Abercrombie & Kent for $6,100 (including a four-day Yangtze River cruise, all meals and air fare from the West Coast).

Pacific Delight’s 1993 prices give an idea of the middle range: A 15-day tour including Shanghai, Suzhou, Guilin, Beijing and Hong Kong ran $3,070 per person, double occupancy, including air fare from the West Coast and almost all meals. The operator’s 26-day tour, which included the same cities along with a four-night Yangtze River cruise, ran $4,340. Remember, however, that China is a booming market; prices are expected to rise next year, in some cases by as much as 20%.

Best times to visit are spring and fall, avoiding the steamy summer and cold, wet winter.

Getting there: United Airlines offers Los Angeles-Shanghai connections via San Francisco or Tokyo. Northwest Airlines offers a connection through Tokyo. Both carriers charge restricted fares beginning at $1,532-$1,660, depending on the season. China Eastern Airlines offers a one-stop direct Los Angeles-Shanghai flight twice weekly for restricted fares starting at $1,356-$1,417, depending on the season.

Where to stay: Shanghai now has about 100 hotels catering to foreign visitors (about 30,000 rooms).

The Hilton International (250 Hua Shan Road; from U.S tel. 800-445-8667 or 011-86-21-248-0000, fax 248-3848 or 248-3868) is among the most comfortable and costly, with a fancy granite lobby, an Italian restaurant, CNN and a heavy volume of business travelers. Regular rates for double rooms run $220; discounts may be available.

Less costly, closer to the waterfront and deeply embedded in the city’s European colonial history is the formerly faded, now somewhat rehabilitated Peace Hotel (20 Nanjing Road; from U.S. tel. 011-86-21-321-1244, fax 329-0300). Standard double rooms: $95-$115. Tour groups, which negotiate better rates than individual travelers can, occasionally use both hotels. For listings of less costly lodgings, consult the Lonely Planet China guidebook noted below.

Where to eat: The fanciest restaurants are in the international hotels. Here are three places to eat local cuisine (lots of seafood) amid local crowds. Be brave; no one is likely to speak English, but bilingual menus are sometimes available.

Green Willow Village Restaurant (763 Nanjing Road; local tel. 253-7221). Dinner for two: about $10. Family atmosphere upstairs, private booths downstairs. Bilingual menu available. Mao Long Restaurant (70 Nanjing Road; local tel. 321-6367). Dinner for two: about $12. Bilingual menu available. Yin Long Restaurant (105-113 Hua Shan Road; local tel. 248-0416). Dinner for two: $18. Menus in Chinese only.

Money: A tricky business. Chinese currency is counted in yuan (which is colloquially known as kuai), and each yuan is made up of 100 fen. But currency comes in two types: Foreign Exchange Certificates (FEC), which trade at around 5.5 yuan to the American dollar, are accepted virtually everywhere; renminbi (widely known as “RMB” or “people’s money”), though theoretically of equivalent value, trades for substantially less on the street.

Beware of cabdrivers and shopkeepers who demand payment in FEC, then say they can only offer change in RMB. Also, note that in industrializing China, inflation is on the march. Tipping, formerly forbidden, is encouraged at the costlier international hotels.

For more information: Contact the China National Tourist Office (333 W. Broadway, Suite 201, Glendale 91204; tel. 818-545-7504). One good guidebook (and there aren’t many that treat China at length) is Lonely Planet’s “China--A Travel Survival Kit” (third edition, 1991; 880 pages; $19.95; a fourth edition is expected in February).