Shanghai: Town of Merchants

THE half-caste child of East and West, Shanghai was built mainly by 19th century European merchants. It has become--in perhaps too many ways--China's New York. It is the nation's largest city (10 million people) and the busiest port in the Communist world, with China's most extensive industry and, consequently, its thickest smog. It also has one of China's largest slums. The hunger and diseases that used to snuff out the lives of thousands of infants annually during the 1930s have gone. But so have the sin and the aura of intrigue and the giddy opulence. The once-imposing semicircle of banks and commercial houses along the Hwang Pu River only dimly reflects the day when Western tycoons lounged in the lobby of the Cathay (now Peace) Hotel or wheeled around in bulletproof cars.

But the old vitality persists. The crowds in Shanghai are noticeably better dressed than in any other Chinese city. The Nanking Road shops are far snappier than anything in Peking. The Communists have been diligently de-Westernizing the city (one street name that has unaccountably survived is Ko An, named for Morris ["Two Gun"] Cohen, a London-born freebooter who was one of Sun Yat-sen's bodyguards). But if Nixon tours the industrial fair during his one-day stay in the city, he might well have a sense of deja vn while inspecting the locally made automobiles. Those Shanghai sedans look remarkably like Chinese Checkers.

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