China's Neocapitalist Communism

SHANGHAI

A NARROW two-story row house on a street now named Hsing Yeh (Promote Enterprise) is home to a museum commemorating the initial meeting, on july 21,1921, of the Congress of the Communist Party that today controls the People's Republic of China. Back then the road was called rue Borgeat

and was part of the French Concession of Shanghai. The mythmakers of Beijing are not bothered by the fact that the Party actual Iy first convened weeks earlier in a nearby girls' school. Or that the one meeting held in the row house, on july 9,1921, was broken up after 10 minutes by a goon squad known as the Green Gang. They were detectives nominally in French employ, but in practice loyal to a Chinese boss, the Green Dragon, who kept a tight grip on the city's underground goings-on. The Congress then moved its proceedings to a luxurious houseboat on a lake 50 miles south of the metropolis, where it ended the inaugural session two weeks later.

The museum's legitimacy aside, it basks in the glamour of the new Shanghai as the focal point of a spacious shopping and amusement park that lures well-heeled, predominantly Chinese, tourists. Called Xintiandi (A New World), it is a monument to Communism in the center of a mercan tile extravaganza, complete with a brimming man-made lake. Among its attractions are restaurants featuring foreign cuisines, cafes, bars, and an inevitable Starbucks, along with art galleries, handicraft showrooms, and several pricey furniture emporiums. It could as easily have been called Jiutiandi (Old World), for it harks back to the cosmopolitan, pre-Communist Shanghai. The area was cleared in brisk totalitarian fashion: 40,000 residents were flatly ordered to move out with no convenient alternative quarters made available. Indeed, the Communist Party has not given up its autocratic ways.