A tale of two cities...

"IF a thousand challengers lie
beneath your feet,
Count me as number one
thousand and one...
I don't believe that death
has no revenge."

-- poet Bei Dao, after a 1976
Tiananmen Square rally

"I HATE the government, but demonstrations are not possible now in Shanghai," said university art student, nervously watching for police or informers as he walked along the stately riverfront Bund where people gather each evening to gossip, exercise or kiss while enjoying a cool breeze.

"In Shanghai, the students are not united enough," he said, identifying himself only as Liu because he feared arrest.

"Tiananmen Square's demonstrations were bigger because Peking is the heart of China," he added, describing how he earlier marched through this east coast port's grimy streets in solidarity with the pro-democracy movement in Peking.

This dynamic, dilapidated and decadent city of 12 million people produced more than 100,000 protest marchers at the height of the rallies.

But the military quietly vanished because of the authorities' sophisticated tactics, a reliance on secret police and the Shanghai populace's traditional concern with making money rather than trouble.

Some diplomats and Chinese students, however, predict an uprising may engulf Shanghai next time if the pro-democracy movement's supporters infiltrate the city after now abandoning Tiananmen Square as their focus due to the regime's strategy in Peking to shoot first and interrogate later.

Shanghai so far has avoided the martial law, confrontations with troops, gunfire or major clashes which bloodied Peking, despite Shanghai's widespread support for greater liberty, press freedom and an end to corruption.

One young waitress, being shown photographs of corpses of students shot near Tiananmen Square, said, "Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng are bad men. I don't like them."

Asked who she favoured instead of the two elderly Chinese communist government leaders, she immediately pointed to a photo of Wang Dan, an outspoken student who helped organise the pro-democracy protests and is now on the government's most wanted list.

A tale of the two cities -- and their fate during the uprising -- would contrast Peking and Shanghai as almost in different worlds.

Peking has traditionally been a rigorously patrolled city hammered by harsh communist campaigns set amid drab, broad avenues and peopled by conservative bureaucrats, conformists, intellectuals, workers and peasants.

Shanghai, however, resembles a sort of turn-of-the-century Manhattan still decked with stylish, original art deco architectural trimmings.

Its seemingly more extroverted, wiley population are steeped in commerce, theatre and the international influences of being a port long exposed to foreigners and the rough and tumble competitiveness as China's biggest and wealthiest city.

Even today, after a frightening crackdown has been unleashed by the regime against "counter-revolutionaries" and "bourgeoise elements," songs by Madonna blare onto the street from a disco on the famous Huangpu River where male and female prostitutes boldly call out to passers-by while surly touts hoarsely whisper, "Hashish? Hashish?"

But if Shanghai is ever to play a major role in striking against the government, the students will have to inspire the impoverished workers to put their lives on the line and stage crippling strikes.

Much of Shanghai is a warren of slums. Overcrowding is so intense that whole families sit outside in fetid alleys as if in a vast living room, playing with their children, skinning chickens, chatting and washing dishes while on bamboo chairs placed in gutters that run in front of their doorways.

In some alleys, amid clogged sewers and bicycle-riding commuters, billiard tables stand surrounded by young men who shoot pool outdoors in the sultry afternoon.

Such squalor could easily fuel a workers' rebellion. But the same poverty may have inhibited them from joining the poorly coordinated student-led protests in Shanghai, in contrast to the turmoil which rocked Peking.

Shanghai has a radical recent history. China's Communist Party was founded in this port in 1921 and the disastrous, ideological Cultural Revolution of 1965-76 which purged the nation's past also began here. Other leftist movements have also been spawned in its teeming streets.

Even the late Chairman Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing, was famous as a somewhat naughty Shanghai actress before she met Mao and was later imprisoned as a "white-boned demon" who usurped him.

Before the 1949 "liberation" of Shanghai by Mao's communists from the corrupt-US-backed Kuomintang, Shanghai was considered the "Paris of the East" though much of it was actually a hedonistic city of opium dens and brothels set amid wretchedly exploited labourers.

A Western diplomat based here said, "Next to Peking, Shanghai was the most active city in the country in terms of pro-democracy demonstrations and sit-ins.

"But Peking was the real focus because you can get more people in Tiananmen Square and it is also the symbolic centre of the nation, especially for a national demonstration against the central government.

"Now fear and heavy repression is taking its toll on Shanghai too. The government's propaganda denying there was a massacre has had some effect among Shanghai's people who naturally fear chaos because they remember the Cultural Revolution and don't want to strangle the city, especially if nothing will result from it," the envoy said.

Peking's rallies enjoyed a commuted, organised student leadership while Shanghai saw its demonstrations dwindle from several thousand to a mere several hundred.

Some workers' groups, however, formed new, illegal independent trade unions which did participate in Shanghai's protests but to little avail except for the arrest of its leaders.

Unlike Peking, Shanghai's authorities did not pour thousands of troops, tanks, armoured personnel carriers and other weaponry into the city despite the disturbances.

The army perhaps feared the port's maze of tiny, winding streets and lack of broad avenues would make such an assault a logistical nightmare vulnerable to easy urban guerrilla warfare.

At least six people died when they were run over by a Peking-to-Shanghai train while blockading the railway tracks on Shanghai's outskirts. An angry mob torched the train.

Authorities put on trial and executed three men in Shanghai on June 22 for setting fire to the train, and more death sentences may follow.

Police say more than 165 people have been arrested in Shanghai for sabotage, blocking transport and other activity. The nationwide arrest toll is near 2,000 people, officials say.

Overall, however, Shanghai police used a "non-confrontational way which eventually worked," the Western diplomat said.

"As far as I know, there's never been a shot fired in anger" during Shanghai's disruptions.

"Ultimately, the students faded away. Now people wonder why Peking wasn't wise enough to use the same approach."