KEY POINTS:
Lounging on a ruby nightclub sofa scattered with pillows, smoking apple-scented tobacco through a hookah, watching the girls with glossy black hair bewitching their Chinese boys; this is the perfect position to ponder the baffling metropolis of Shanghai.
In the warm midnight air of a bar called Barbarossa, the conversation is getting louder as exorbitant cocktails slide down jewelled throats. At the bar, a Belgian man with his forearm in plaster is talking about when the Armani boutique opened: "You should have seen all the rich Chinese with their pretty girlfriends buying leather jackets - but it's sad," he says, "Shanghai never used to be this hip, so hip it's starting to get annoying, you know what I mean?"
This is post-colonial, post-Mao Shanghai, elegant and filthy, open all hours, the baffling metropolis, contradictory and thrilling.
Sometimes Shanghai is China, sometimes not. It is a police state and a shopper's paradise. On the Bund balconies, the after-dinner Westerners cluster, breathing an awestruck "aaah" as the city's gleaming new skyscrapers, all in unison, switch off their neon lights at the Government-decreed hour of 10pm. Thick smog hangs permanently over the town, but no rubbish is allowed to linger on these streets.
For more than 100 years, Shanghai was the hook-up joint of East and West, the most decadent city in the Orient. In the early 19th century, China infuriated Britain, France and America by outlawing opium, the currency Western merchants were busily importing, in exchange for Chinese tea and other goods. After a British attack on its coast in 1842, the Qing Emperor offered a peace deal: Western traders would be allowed to set up shop in Shanghai and trade with
little interference from Beijing.
Over the next century, the city became a capitalist's dream, but it all came crashing to an end in 1966, when China's communist leaders launched the cultural revolution from Shanghai.
By the 1990s, Beijing turned it around again, announcing Shanghai would be developed as a model of controlled capitalism. Now, the city's leaders are rushing towards modernity, mowing down old buildings and reclaiming swampland, wooing multinationals and knocking up skyscrapers.
Shanghai is still a little wild at heart. It boasts one of Asia's most famous sights - the Bund, an avenue of neoclassical buildings arrayed proudly along the Huangpu River. On the other side of the river, in the new industrial area of Pudong, flicker the lights of tomorrow's Shanghai, towers and needles and orbs of glass and concrete, zooming skywards.
Close up, it's all a bit grotty. Walking along the Bund one afternoon, I battle German tour groups, striding businesswomen in navy suits, apricot-sellers jogging with twin wicker baskets bouncing from poles slung across their shoulders. The traffic roars past, not bothering much about lights or pedestrians, and the smoke and noise swirl behind them.
The city's real thrill is its atmosphere of crumbling colonialism, but Shanghai's tourist officials aren't interested in old; they want visitors to pack into elevators, zoom up the tallest towers and marvel at the skyline.
Once you get there, however, the only way to see the view is to buy a postcard. From the 88-floor Jinmao Tower, all I can see is the thick brown-yellow smog enveloping the city. "Very foggy today," says our tour guide brightly.
The presence of Mao is still real. "The police are always protecting you," reads a sign outside the police station in Suzhou. It feels half reassuring, half menacing; exactly the impression we get from the "official history" at Shanghai's Urban Planning Exhibition Centre. "The big capitalist powers forced China into overseas trade after the Opium Wars so the Qing emperor signed the unfair [1842] Treaty of Nanjing," says the centre's guide, Vivian Suen Xiao Lan, 23, wearing high-heeled shoes sparkling with sequinned bows. Vivian is part of the city's riddle. Her shoes may glitter, but she is a Shanghai Miss with the soul of a Red Guard, reciting her propaganda by rote.
Some days, especially listening to zealous officials like Vivian, Shanghai feels like a dynamic new frontier, the future of Asia. Other days, it just seems like a wannabe player, so desperate to catch up with Singapore and Taipei that it risks overlooking its real treasures - its architecture and warm, charming people. Third-world and futuristic, Shanghai is eternally surprising.
* Claire Harvey travelled to Shanghai as a guest of Air New Zealand (www.airnz.co.nz).
