DEAGLÁN de BRÉADÚN/SHANGHAI LETTER: The Chinese bellboy was delighted to meet me. "You are first Irish to stay at this hotel. Welcome Sir!" The badge on his lapel gave his name as Dicky.
I wondered if this was the name his parents had chosen for him, and if his colleagues and fellow-citizens on the hotel staff, Shirley, Helena and Tom had also originally been called something else. But it would have been rude to ask and the first thing I learnt about China, long before I ever expected to go there, is that the people value decorum and good manners.
However, it probably would have horrified Chairman Mao Zedong, the leader of China's revolution, that young people working in Western-style hotels in his country might adopt Western names, presumably for the convenience of their foreign customers.
But a more fundamental question is, what would Mao think of his party and even some of his old comrades presiding over, not a communist but a capitalist revolution in their country? The only obvious link I detected between today's China and the ancien regime was the fact that Mao's face adorns the country's banknotes.
There is a famous and rather unfortunate quote from the American journalist, Lincoln Steffens, who said on the occasion of his first visit to the former Soviet Union: "I have seen the future and it works." He was wrong, it wasn't the future, and it didn't work. But one could apply this quotation with considerably more accuracy to the China that communists, of all people, have created in Shanghai in 2004.
Here is capitalism in full flower, with a skyline that rivals and will probably eventually outdo Manhattan's and a buzz of activity that few, if any, Western cities could match. Business is booming and entrepreneurs from the West are flocking to the new El Dorado. At a dinner of Irish business people with a visiting delegation from Enterprise Ireland in Shanghai's opulent Jean Georges restaurant, I was virtually showered with calling-cards from pleasant young Irishmen and women out to make their fortune in the East.
After 40 years of stagnation, Shanghai, along with other parts of China, is undergoing one of the most extraordinary economic expansions ever seen.
Since the communists took over in 1949, China has been subjected to a whole series of political and social experiments. Usually, they ended in tears and, in the case of the Cultural Revolution, even started that way. Shanghai before the revolution was a byword for decadence, rampant commercialism and avaricious foreign interventions. The bright lights dimmed when the communists took power and the once great city became something of a backwater. But now, Shanghai is back with a vengeance, and it takes one's breath away.
Everyone around the world with an interest in making money seems to want a piece of the action in Shanghai. Driving through the new commercial area after dusk is a startling experience. Buildings of all shapes and sizes from large to massive, tall to stratospheric, flash their lights in the evening gloom. The message is unmistakable: Shanghai is open again for business. My taxi-driver pointed to the new wonders of construction with a mixture of pride and awe. Perhaps, in this day and age, only a communist government with unbridled authoritarian powers and no political opposition or annoying independent journalists could encompass this type of change and with such speed. If the government wants something done, it gets done.
The multi-lane highway from the airport is a good example. It seems to go on forever in a perfectly straight line, and obviously anything in the way was simply moved or demolished. A new monorail alongside makes the journey to and from the airport even faster.
It's not quite what Marx and Lenin had in mind but, for all that, highly exhilarating. At some point the growing prosperity of the population must surely bring them into conflict with their authoritarian rulers but there has been little sign of that since the bloody suppression of the protests at Beijing's Tienanmen Square in 1989.
Chinese leaders run a tight ship and a resident foreign correspondent lamented the fact that there was so little news in the place. The top people never talked out of turn: they did not "do" lunch with journalists and, when you met them at a reception, they did no more than exchange a few jokes.
Nobody knew what was really going on, my colleague said, and the people were so "brainwashed" that they did not care about their lack of freedoms, only about making money. Other foreigners I met extolled the merits of life in Shanghai, not least the personal security one enjoys at all hours of the day and night. Nobody worries about being mugged in this city, I was told.
The only place I could find the old revolutionary posters was among the stalls of a city flea market.
There was Mao waving to the happy peasants who supposedly wanted nothing more than to follow the precepts outlined in his Little Red Book of political quotations.
Revolutions, whether capitalist, communist or, in China's case, capitalist-communist, are not noted for either pity or sentiment. A fairly pitiless revolutionary in his day, Mao would probably understand.