THINK BIG Xintiandi nurtured the ambition of real estate executive Pan Hao

A Place in Time
How five families tied to one Shanghai neighborhood made Chinese history

By Hannah Beech

Five would become traitors to the Communist cause. Seven would die before the founding of the People's Republic in 1949—some of them, historians suspect, killed by the Communists themselves. Only three would make it into the upper echelons of the Party, and of those one would die prematurely after a campaign to erase class lines unleashed a decade-long reign of terror. When the 13 young delegates of China's fledgling Communist Party, including a forceful activist named Mao Zedong and a cerebral philosopher called Li Da, met in a cramped lane house in Shanghai on July 23, 1921, they had nothing less than the future of their ailing homeland on their minds. Dodging police by disguising themselves as the Peking University Summer Vacation Tourist Group, they convened what they called the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China. It was an ambitious designation: in 1921, China's Communist ranks numbered only 53 members.

	PHOTO ESSAY Inheriting the New China In Shanghai, a paean to newfound wealth rises around the birthplace of Chinese Communism

Today, the site of the first Party Congress has been turned into a museum visited daily by hundreds of students and shabbily dressed tourists from China's vast interior. They stroll past a giant hammer-and-sickle flag, a display of rubber clubs and wire whips used by foreign police before they were run out of town by the heroic Communists, and pause before a sign that reads: "The founding of the Communist Party of China is the inevitable outcome of the development of China's modern history." But who among the 13 delegates could have envisioned the China that now lies just outside the doors of the museum? In the shadow of the Communist Party's birthplace stands one of the most audacious paeans to capitalist excess in all of China: an entertainment mecca of nightclubs, designer stores and restaurants called Xintiandi, or "New Heaven and Earth."

China's modern-day pleasure dome was the brainchild of Hong Kong developer Vincent Lo, who, back in 1996, dreamed of what Shanghai could one day become. Through a studious courting of mid-level bureaucrats now crowding the top strata of the Shanghai government—including current mayor Han Zheng—Lo secured the rights to 52 hectares of prime city land surrounding the first Party Congress hall. At the time, most of the Xintiandi area was a decrepit maze of row houses that had been rotting away for eight decades. City planners warned Lo that he could not build anything taller than the first congress hall—lest a flashy nightclub dwarf the historic meeting place—so he came up with a $168 million design of refurbished row houses that echoed London's Covent Garden. Lo wasn't sure whether municipal elders would approve, but shortly after the project was unveiled in 2001, Lo asked the director of the Xintiandi museum for his thoughts. "I was quite nervous," Lo recalls, "but the director said the Communist Party's role is to better the living standard of Chinese people, and that's what Xintiandi is doing."

	FROM OUR ARCHIVES Shanghai Swings! The long slumber is over, and Shanghai is grooving to an exuberant global beat Sept. 20, 2004

The Xintiandi neighborhood nowadays boasts a Ferrari outlet (the cheapest car goes for about $320,000), a Wall Street English-language center (a six-month "survival English" course costs $6,300), and a luxe lifestyle store (a tiny cast-iron skillet is priced at $60, more than one-third of the average Chinese farmer's annual income). Even the tourists who come to pay homage to the Communist landmark are beguiled by the buffet of consumerism laid out before them. "Over there, you can buy German sausages and French cakes," a guide yells into a megaphone, as a crowd of sightseers from rural Anhui province peer at red-faced Westerners and chic Chinese feasting on bratwursts and cafés au lait. "Very expensive, very tasty." Just around the corner towers another real estate project, whose very name signifies just how far China's Communist experiment has evolved: Rich Gate.

For many living in the vicinity of Xintiandi and beyond, China's explosive rise is merely evidence of a proud civilization once again discovering its grandeur. We invented paper and gunpowder and pasta, they say. Of course, we can build the tallest building on the globe and boast some of the world's speediest growth rates. But, in truth, China's journey is not quite the neat geometric proof where the ends of the circle tie together, as in greatness past = greatness future. Rather, modern China's path to renewed prominence is like a walk through a fun-house hall of mirrors. Who's to say what the real China is: that overstuffed figure gorging on record levels of foreign direct investment, or that Giacometti silhouette still digesting the traumas of the Cultural Revolution? Perhaps the most fitting metaphor for China today is the mirror that shatters an image into a kaleidoscopic impression, where ideologies from communism to capitalism are refracted to create a dazzling yet dizzying pattern. No place better represents that complex vision than Xintiandi, a theme park of materialism wrapped around a shrine to Marxism. In this anachronistic jumble of Mao-suited pensioners and briefcase-wielding entrepreneurs thrives a confluence of past, present and future. This is the new heaven, the new earth, the new China.

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