Letter from Qingdao Clifford CoonanGoing by the shopping malls at street level below marble-clad skyscrapers and the smooth four-lane blacktop highways which are as plush as new carpets, you could be in a city in Midwestern America or southern Germany. It's only when the taxi driver lurches in a wide arc to avoid a flat-bed tricycle trundling along the passing lane, a migrant worker squatting on the back reading a newspaper folded into a small square, that you realise you're not in Kansas at all. You're still very much in China, just a clean and prosperous version.
A bright, open city looking over Jiazhou Bay from the southern end of the Shandong peninsula, Qingdao is a handsome city, the most habitable in China, according to recent polls. And it's a very rich city too, prompting the feeling that you are in Des Moines or Chicago rather than the edge of China.
When you read about the booming cities of China's eastern seaboard, usually in opposition to the impoverished dust bowls of Henan and Shaanxi, Qingdao is one of the places they mean.
Qingdao is a colonial city. The Germans ran what was then the colony of Tsingtao from 1897 until the Japanese took over during the first World War.
The city's European architecture, particularly the villas of the Badaguan area, are very reminiscent of Germany though it's hard to know exactly what version of Germany it most reminds you of - the residential areas most closely resemble the suburbs of Hamburg and Berlin that you see in pre-second World War photographs.
The city can also thank German beer purity laws for its excellent, world-famous Tsingtao beer. The Tsingtao brewery was set up by the Germans in 1903 and a tour around the malting houses reveals some of the original machinery supplied for the brewery by Siemens, which, apparently, the engineering giant is keen to buy back for its museum. Tsingtao is holding on to the mighty engines for now.
These days, the city of over seven million people is the Chinese mainland's second-largest port and a popular destination for foreign investment, much of it from neighbouring Korea and nearby Japan, or from Taiwan which was quick to recognise Qingdao, and the province of Shandong, as a useful way into China. The presence of industrial giants like the white-goods manufacturer Haier and electronics company Hisense have helped secure its position as the richest city in Shangdong. Its boating tradition and facilities mean it will host the maritime events in the 2008 Summer Olympics and this has given Qingdao's already high standing in the league tables of Chinese cities a further boost.
Passing along the central thoroughfare, pride of place is given to a bold, blue-painted billboard adorned with the smiling, steady features of the late paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, beaming out from a background of high-rise buildings and other symbols of prosperity. His reforms in the late 1970s were the agents of change in China, naming Qingdao as one of the 14 coastal cities opened to foreign trade and investment in 1984.
Deng started a process of opening up that continues to this day and the benefits of these sweeping changes are being reaped most plentifully along the east coast and in the south of the country, as well as in big cities like Beijing.
Deng probably wouldn't have approved of the hoarding - he disliked revolutionary romanticism and steadfastly opposed cults of personality during his lifetime. With good reason - he watched the almost religious feeling which centred on Chairman Mao Zedong proliferate into the terrifying zeal of the Cultural Revolution, which began 40 years ago. During 10 years of hardline Communist mania, hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and artists were attacked, disgraced and killed by dogma-driven Red Guards. Mao liked his second-in-command Deng, and unlike his close ally, Liu Bocheng, who died in prison, he escaped the Cultural Revolution with his life, although he was stripped of power and sent into internal exile.
And his family certainly suffered during the Cultural Revolution - one of his sons, Pufeng, was thrown from a window in Beijing and has spent his life in a wheelchair.
It's happy to say thank you to Deng Xiaoping, but generally Qingdao is a pragmatic place which has never dwelt too long on politics, at least not in recent years. Anti-Japanese sentiment is not a divisive issue in a city where investment from Japan is so welcome. And standing on the seafront, you just have to breathe in to see how it won the liveable city reputation. As Beijing grapples with hundreds of thousands of tons of dust and sand in the air, and Shanghai chokes on smog, Qingdao is getting the windsurf boards out.
Engaged couples queue to get their wedding photos taken at the seaside as the waves crash against the rocks and the German villas look down. These photographs are an essential part of the wedding programme and are taken weeks before the ceremony itself.
One bride lifts up her gown to negotiate her way across the rocks, and you can see she's got her jeans and trainers on underneath.