China today through Shanghai eyes.(Asia)

THE RATHER NARROW and somewhat low--hardly twelve feet wide and barely two storeys high--rowhouse that on July 21, 1921 stood on the even then constricted rue Borgeat in the French Concession of Shanghai is today nominally the site of the Inaugural Congress of the Communist Party, which today nominally controls the People's Republic of China.

An excessive regard for fact has in this matter, as in so many others, not inhibited the myth-makers of Beijing. The date, like the site, is nominal, for the party's first meetings actually occurred in a nearby girls' school. The only session convened in that three-room house, actually on July 9, 1921, was broken up after ten minutes by a squad of detectives under a French inspector of police.

The Inaugural Congress, which formally created the new party on the authoritarian Marxist-Leninist model, actually closed its proceedings two weeks later on a gorgeously appointed houseboat on a lake fifty miles south of the metropolis.

Nonetheless, the officially sanctified site, which partakes of the unique glamour of Shanghai, is now the focus of a spacious shopping and amusement park that lures well-heeled tourists--predominantly Chinese, though foreigners as well--by its exotic attractions. The street on which the rowhouse stands is now, significantly, called Hsing Yeh, which means Promote Enterprise.

The tourist attractions include not only the Paulaner Brauhaus, which recalls gemutlich Munich, but the CJW cafe, characterised by Shanghai insider Paul French as "Cigars, Jazz, Wine--mostly upscale Chinese [patrons]--with the most expensive drinks in town--very show-off". There is, too, flamboyantly Parisian La Maison, "for people who don't have a visa to France but have plenty of money, it has lots of pictures of Edith Piaf'. Also, inevitably, Starbucks, as well as four snooty establishments serving fusion food--and a most unlikely eatery that features organic ingredients, hardly a favourite of the omnivorous Chinese. Further attractions are Latina, for Brazilian barbecue, and the Golden Elephant Thai Restaurant.

In addition, the glamorised park provides art galleries and handicraft showrooms. By no means least are several gloriously pricy emporiums, each with its own hyper-modern decor, that offer elaborate wooden furniture--in a nation so short of forests that it burns vast quantities of its abundant brown coal reserves, which are, by and large, low in heat and highly polluting. China is, further, fast becoming the world's second-largest importer of oil, which is used to provide commercial and domestic energy, as well as to power the fleets of motorcars and trucks that multiply like beetles on the constantly extended network of multi-lane super-highways, which are beautified by lavishly landscaped fifty-yard-wide borders.

Incidentally, but by no means coincidentally, the municipality of Shanghai wants to close the city proper to the bicycle, which was mass-produced by the People's Republic as the transport of the masses. Access to all Shanghai districts by the network of elevated highways is now so easy for automobiles that the lowly bicycle is getting in the way--causing traffic jams, even gridlock. And if that means banning the vehicle of the working classes for the vehicle of the well-to-do, why, everyone is getting rich nowadays.