IN Shanghai the high-life starts after 10 pm in the elegant Golden Age Business Club on Huai Hai Road. On stage, a graceful light-skinned Russian revue troupe performs - members of the former Soviet Kazakhstan ballet ensemble. Out of work back home in Almaty they are now employed under contract in Shanghai.
Chinese go-go dancers sporting bright red wigs and hostesses in silk cheongsams entertain the mostly Chinese clientele. The waiters are in coat-tails and the decor is marble. The first whisky costs 260 yuan (about HK$241.45) and the rent for one of the three presidential karaoke suites is 8,000 yuan. But the club is full on this Saturday night. Business people from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan entertain clients behind soundproof windows overlooking the spectacular floor show.
The club belongs to the Taiwanese Golden Age nightclub chain, which has a string of successful outlets in Taipei. At night, the differences between Hong Kong, Taipei and Shanghai are barely noticeable. The motto seems to be the same in all three cities: Work hard and play hard. But didn't party chief Jiang Zemin complain about the tendency towards 'shocking decadence' in a recent speech to the Communist Party discipline commission? Not as far as the Shanghai political leadership is concerned.
'People should amuse themselves, we need more places of entertainment and culture. There is nothing wrong with karaoke. The people should sing and enjoy themselves,' deputy party general secretary Huang Qifang told visiting foreign correspondents recently. Greater Shanghai has 13 million inhabitants, about 1 per cent of China's population. The city is big, rich, modern and brash. In the 1920s, Shanghai was a boom city of cinemas, cabarets and revolution. After a long eclipse it is reclaiming its former glory. After 1949 the city was allowed to decay until the late patriarch Deng Xiaoping decided to revive it. Deng said if he had one regret, it was that he decided too late to pour money into Shanghai.
Now, there is no shortage of money. But large sections of state-owned industries, steel plants, textile factories, shipyards and the aircraft industry are in disarray. Hundreds of thousands of workers have been laid off but ongoing investment projects have absorbed many of these.
Prestige cultural projects include a recently completed Shanghai museum and an opera house under construction. There are 2,000 skyscrapers under construction in Shanghai and across the river the new city of Pudong, where Hong Kong companies have invested US$6.5 billion, is taking shape daily.