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China is communist, yet its people may be the world's most natural and engaging capitalists.

Sixty years after Mao Zedong drove former leader Chiang Kai Shek from his last stronghold in the Sichuan capital of Chengdu, Chinese communism's most sacred sites are over-run by a young, thriving spirit of free enterprise.

Chengdu - get this - is now wooing international industry by offering a three-year corporate tax holiday to any company that relocates to the growing provincial city. Roger Douglas would be proud.

In Shanghai, the last, loyalist communists make pilgrimages to a small, two-storey villa on Huangpi Rd where, in 1921, their party was founded. Yet the building is now surrounded by high-priced restaurants, cocktail bars, and fountains on which wealthy young Chinese women will pose, elegant skirts split to expose a length of leg for the boyfriend's camera.
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Mao would roll in his granite mausoleum.

Shanghai is like Rome in its heyday, London when it led the Empire, New York as the world's immigrants flooded in little more than a century ago. Shanghai is a city at the peak of its powers, young and brash and confident and expansionist. It is expanding perhaps faster than any city, anywhere before. On the way from the airport, a new motorway interchange, bigger than Auckland's spaghetti junction, has been built in less than six months

A quarter century ago, the tallest building was a 22-storey hotel. Now the city has 70 buildings more than 170m tall, and at least another 16 under construction. When the 632m Shanghai Tower is completed in 2014, it will be almost twice the height of Auckland's Sky Tower.

Shanghai has the world's longest sea bridge, at 36km. It has the world's fastest train, the 431km/h Maglev, which makes the 30km trip from Pudong International Airport to the city in a breathtaking seven minutes.

Tourism executive Jasmine Lee describes Shanghai as Little New York by day, Little Las Vegas by night. That is, if anything, an enormous compliment to New York and Las Vegas.

Lee grew up in a west Shanghai apartment with her parents and grandmother, a chamber pot in place of a bathroom.

But when the first international investment was allowed in 1992, her apartment block was demolished and replaced with office buildings. Her family was allocated a new 80sq m apartment, free, on the other side of town. Since then, residential real estate values have more than quadrupled. A two-bedroom apartment costs more than 2 million yuan - despite all real estate being leaseholds that revert to the developer at the end of the 70-year terms.

The provincial government is celebrating with buntings at every motorway toll booth, banners on every lamp post. Like many other provinces, it is giving most employees an eight-day holiday. Those who do work will sign off civil weddings, but not divorces.

And the people are celebrating in bars and restaurants. On Bar St, a break-dancer entertains in a T-shirt emblazoned with the tongue-in-cheek claim, "I married a Communist".

Three years ago, 24-year-old Chengdu singer Jane Zhang, 24, won Supergirl (China's answer to American Idol) and soared to number one in the charts with the single, You help me find another heaven.

Old China proscribed religion, instead urging its people to seek solace in the state. Today, young China has found itself another heaven.

Jonathan Milne travelled to China courtesy of Air New Zealand
[NZ Herald: Oct 06, 2009]