China's Journey
Modern China's narrative started in Xintiandi and, in many ways, it ends in this neighborhood of graceful row houses now ringed by skyscrapers. Those who lived, toiled, dreamed and died in the New Heaven and Earth symbolize the path China has taken from experimental communism to frontier capitalism, through events as joyful as the founding of the People's Republic, as cataclysmic as the Cultural Revolution, and as mind-spinning as entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO)—the body that sets the rules for global capitalism. China's history has always had an epic sweep to it, but the chronology of Xintiandi—and the characters tied to it—underline the monumentality of the changes that have defined the world's most populous nation. Among those shaping Xintiandi's history: a philosopher who sold Marxism to a feudal nation; the families of a socialist soldier and a disgraced entrepreneur living side by side; a migrant with big dreams of the big city; and a Communist Youth League star turned capitalist who, like so many in China today, pursues happiness through riches as opposed to revolutionary rigor. Theirs are lives that speak of betrayal, injustice, disillusionment, deprivation, loss, redemption and reward, and their stories, told here, reflect the People's Republic in all its diversity as it hurtles toward a future its founders could never have imagined.

The journey begins with one of China's earliest Communist thinkers. Just by looking at a picture of Li Da, you can tell he was an intellectual: shaved head, scholarly glasses, dreamy expression. Whereas his fellow first Party Congress delegate Mao Zedong was all about action—Long Marches, Great Leaps Forward, Cultural Revolutions—Li sat back and untangled the intricacies of dialectical materialism. Mao was indebted, recalling that he had read Li's Elements of Sociology 10 times and, a tad less impressively, his Elements of Economics three-and-a-half times. Shortly after the 1921 meeting, the pair started the Hunan Self-Study University to provide schooling for those who could not otherwise afford higher education. The families of Li and Mao grew together, baby-sitting for each other and hashing out Communist dogma over shared tureens of rice. Although the families were separated when Mao and his Red Army crisscrossed China fighting the nationalist Kuomintang (MT) troops and the invading Japanese forces, Li Da was one of the dignitaries who gathered on a rostrum atop Beijing's Gate of Heavenly Peace when Chairman Mao declared the dawn of the People's Republic on Oct. 1, 1949. Li's son, Li Xintian, now an 84-year-old research professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, remembers his father's pride at being included: to commemorate the event, Li Da changed his own date of birth to Oct. 2, one day after the People's Republic's founding. "He said it was the best moment of his life," recalls Li Xintian. "We were so happy he could be there and see his dream for China come true."

But in the months and years following what Mao dubbed China's "liberation," the Communists struggled just to feed and shelter the citizens of their war-ravaged nation. Those who supported the Marxist cause were often rewarded first. Shortly after 1949, Hu Dusheng, a soldier in the newly formed armed police, was given a 7-sq-m home in what is now the Xintiandi neighborhood as compensation for his loyalty. His family would not stay in Shanghai for long. In 1959, Hu's police battalion was commissioned to join the national rural-construction effort. At first, he thought they would be relocated to Anhui province for no more than five years. But the night before they left, the military leaders gathered the troops together and handed each a bright red flower, a rare spot of color in a drab area. "They were told they were going to be permanently resettled to this backward place," says Hu's son, Hu Jianguo, who grew up on tales of this deception. "The leaders said they should be proud, but my parents were very upset." Across the nation, Mao's utopian engineering project called the Great Leap Forward led to the starvation of an estimated 30 million people. In Anhui, up to a quarter of the population died. The Hu family eventually survived on wild yams that used to be fed only to pigs.

Back in Xintiandi, a few doors down from where the Hus had been assigned their tiny living space, the Zhu family watched their fortune crumble. In 1921, just as the Party founders were gathering a block away, the Zhu patriarch, a wealthy paper merchant, purchased a pair of elegant row houses for his large family. His daughter, Elsia, now 84, attended an élite private girls' school, where she learned the courtly English she still speaks today. Elsia married an economist who briefly worked for the KMT's fiscal bureau. The job would haunt the family when Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to reinvigorate socialist fervor. Already, the family had seen their spacious living quarters whittled down to just three rooms. But with Red Guards roaming the country excoriating anyone without impeccable Communist credentials, the Zhus were branded as both capitalists and traitors. Their remaining rooms were seized to make way for a harmonica factory. Elsia's husband didn't return from re-education through labor camps until 1982. Two years later, they were given back their three rooms in Xintiandi, but like tens of millions of Chinese traumatized by the decade-long episode, the pain still lingers. "We can never forget what happened," says Elsia. "Everything was turned upside down."

The Cultural Revolution didn't just tear apart capitalist or KMT-associated families. By the 1960s, Marxist intellectual Li Da was living a contemplative life as president of Wuhan University in central China. His son was enjoying a successful medical career in Beijing, as was his wife—proof of the Communists' pledge that women should "hold up half the sky" and not hobble around on bound feet. But intellectuals were one of the Red Guards' prime targets, and even as Li Da toiled on an update to his Elements of Sociology that incorporated Mao Zedong Thought, thousands of young radicals surrounded his house, calling for his head. A few days later, Li died alone in a hospital of "a peptic ulcer." The Xintiandi museum obscures the details of Li's death, only noting that Mao's philosophical mentor "died of disease" in 1966.

During this time, Li Da's son and daughter-in-law were sent to the countryside to atone for their intellectualism through peasant work. Their only daughter, Li Dian, who was a bright student, never got the chance to attend university. At 15, she was sent to work in a chemical factory for eight years. Today, Li Dian works 12-hour days at an optometry store, calibrating lens machinery. "This job isn't what I wanted, but I was assigned it by my work unit," she says. "My generation did whatever we were told." Even now, she despises her family for its intellectual roots because of the trauma of 40 years ago. "I wish I had been born into a worker family," she says, as her father looks down in embarrassment. "I married a worker, and I want my daughter to be a worker," she continues. Asked what has been the happiest period in her life, the 49-year-old woman with broad shoulders and callused hands pauses for a moment, then answers: "When I could carry 100-kg bags of salt in the factory and prove my revolutionary spirit."

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