A tale of two cities:

...It was not left to itself, however, and after 1949 the forces that were to drive the new China came not from the cities, but from the hinterland, from the peasant armies and the peasant unions on which Mao and his colleagues had built their power...

...Today Hong Kong may hold the same promise for China's future that Shanghai once did...

...When the city fell to Chiang Kai-shek's armies in 1927, he turned on his Communist and left-wing allies, slaughtering them, breaking up their labor unions, and driving his opponents underground- the White Terror, his opponents called it...

...More ominously, Jiang seems to embody, like Deng and Li Peng, the contradictory desires for economic advance and continuing tight political controls...

...My Chinese hosts put me up at the Jinjiang Hotel where Richard Nixon and Zhou Enlai had signed the Shanghai communique on February 1972, just as China was beginning to open up after the Cultural Revolution...

...Even if it is true that communism is dead or dying, we must not assume that it is going to be a peaceful death...

...Presumably it would have been easy for the authorities to stop them, easy for them to cut the reception of American television broadcasts, yet they did not...

...The signs of what had happened were all over the city: taxis with black streamers running from their aerials, buses carrying posters denouncing the Chinese leaders, student groups at the Star Ferry handing out pamphlets, raising money for the movement in China, and in a Kowloon store window, a computer programmed to repeat over and over again the four characters Dadao Li Peng] "Down with Li Peng...

...Li Peng," read one, "when you have slaughtered a billion Chinese, will you be satisfied...

...To say that the Chinese press and television told lies to their people would be too charitable...

...On Tuesday evening, however, a train ran a barricade that had cut rail traffic in Shanghai's outskirts, killing a number of students, and leading an enraged crowd to set it on fire...

...Hong Kong and Shanghai have very different pasts, yet certain themes bind them together historically...

...Perhaps more than anything else in the city, it symbolizes the choice that Hong Kong may make or may be forced to make after 1997: either opening itself to the world, in which Hong Kong becomes a microcosm of the new China...

...The students demanded a "triple strike" (san ba)-of classes, of factories, of shops- but the most evident result was the sudden quiet that came to the city as traffic disappeared from the streets and the horns fell silent...

...Thanks to its foreign administered enclaves protected from Chinese intervention, thanks, too, to Beijing's weakness before Chiang rose to power, Shanghai in the early twentieth century had gone its own way, building a system quite different from that of China as a whole...

...by then the foreign consulates and foreign embassies were advising their citizens to leave China, trying to find those in the interior and to get them out to the airports...

...it is notable that the independent labor unions in Shanghai and Beijing this spring were quickly suppressed...

...In Fudan University, a student told me, a Goddess of Liberty had been erected...

...Yet left to itself it might have had a greater effect on China, on her search for wealth and power, her drive for modernization...

...Were there those, as some have suggested, anxious to have the news get out...

...How will the Communists treat Hong Kong after 1997...

...Over the next few days, photocopies of Chinese papers from Hong Kong were plastered up on walls and telephone poles, and they, along with reports from the Voice of America and the BBC, told of an ever increasing death toll: a hundred killed, several hundred, a thousand, several thousand...

...Despite the roadblocks formed by buses and other vehicles, the protests were mostly peaceful...

...The theory of "one country, two systems" that Deng Xiaoping promises Hong Kong-that she can go her own way for fifty years after 1997-is not new...

...Since the turn of the century, Shanghai's modern Chinese businessmen had done much to build up their city at a time when Beijing was too weak to interfere or to restrain them...

...In Hong Kong today the building that dominates all others is Beijing's new Bank of China...

...Within a couple of days there were very few foreigners left at the Jinjiang...

...Chiang's government, however, had more power at its disposal, and after 1927 Shanghai lost its old independence...

...Shanghai that afternoon looked much as it always does-a city smoky and dusty under a summer sun not yet as fierce as it would become, crowds in the streets, a continual blare from the horns of trucks and buses, and, as evening fell, a continual trill from the tens of thousands of bicycle bells as people made their way home in the twilight...

...A satellite link brought in American television broadcasts with their pictures of the bloody events of June 4, and the aftermath, with its rumors of civil war, of more casualties in other cities...

...Seventy stories high, designed as a shaft of blue-green glass by I.M...

...What would President Bush do to help...

...Nor would everyone agree that he will last long...

...I managed to fly down to Hong Kong that evening...

...Every evening Chinese and English Hong Kong papers arrived by air and were sold out within minutes to those who wanted real news...

...In sharp contrast, at my hotel it was as if the Chinese propaganda machine did not exist...

...But to outsiders like me, it seemed that the protesters were running out of steam and that the government had wisely decided to outwait them until heat, exhaustion, and the end of the academic year would combine to empty Tiananmen Square...

...Given Shanghai's problems, and the problems of the Chinese economy, not everyone would agree that he has succeeded...

...Foreigners were bombarded with questions: How much did we know...

...Deng Xiaoping is China's new First Emperor," said another, referring to the tyrant who first united China in 221 B.C., and who, as the Chinese saying goes, buried scholars alive and burned their books...

...A particularly large group had collected at the entrance to the Academy of Social Sciences, where the World Economic Herald had been published until its outspoken editor, Qin Benli, had been ousted by the government a month earlier...

...Look at Shanghai, they say, after forty years of the New China: for all its new joint ventures, for all its new office buildings and hotels, it remains a huge, ungainly city with an infrastructure desperately in need of renovation, of fundamental restructuring...

...Several years ago, a British businessman told me that the optimists in Hong Kong are those who think that after 1997 the Hong Kong spirit will spread gradually through China, encouraged by Deng's gradual opening of his country to the world...

...The night I left, a television program described troops patiently enduring vicious attacks before persuading students to leave the square peacefully and without incident...

...The desperate years of Japanese invasion and occupation during the war, of Nationalist reoccupation after 1945, finished the job...

...On Thursday morning new posters were up, this time from the city government, threatening reprisals against any who disturbed the peace...

...Today Beijing justifies its repression by visions of the new white terror that would follow the victory of what it calls counterrevolution...

...NICHOLAS R. CLIFFORD Nicholas R. Clifford teaches Chinese history at Middlebury College, Vermont and is completing a book about foreigners in Shanghai in the 1920s...

...It was not to be...

...Pei, it towers above all its rivals, arrogantly oblivious to the scale of its geographical setting...

...Consulates were telling us in no uncertain terms to leave, and it was clear with the city disrupted that there was little chance of further work...

...Acapricious master, Chiang was more interested in extracting revenues from the city than in encouraging an economic growth that might have challenged his regime...

...If you want to keep your self-respect as a nation," a man told me in very precise English, "you must impose sanctions, pull out your investments, and break off relations with China...

...The massacre of June 4 proved once again that ruling cliques do not surrender power easily...

...As Shanghai's physical appearance mirrors a past Western dominance, that of Hong Kong, with its great concrete and glass office buildings, mirrors the world of international trade and finance...

...or accepting the dominance of Beijing, in which China becomes a macrocosm of the new Hong Kong...

...Neither Chiang nor the Communists left Shanghai alone...

...One should not romanticize the history of old Shanghai, a city that was often corrupt and often cruel...

...Was it true that Chinese diplomats in Washington had sided with the students...

...There, too, there had been protest strikes and massive demonstrations...

...Yet Jiang faces a task even more difficult than that of his predecessors...

...The new head of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin, is a former mayor of Shanghai, a man who made his reputation as a technocrat, who has tried to make Shanghai the economic bellwether of the People's Republic of China under Deng's open-door policy...

...Outside crowds were already gathering in the streets, and the first roadblocks were going up...

...in the thirteen years since Mao's death, his three predecessors have all been ousted...

...Sixty-five years ago, Shanghai seemed to point the way to China's future, a future of a modern economy, a modern industry, a modern society, and, for those on the left, a modern industrial proletariat to usher in the red dawn of socialism...

...Why would he not do more...

...Moral authority has always counted for much in Chinese culture, in determining whether political power enjoys the legitimacy it needs for effective rule...

...Since June 4, Li Peng and his colleagues have lost that authority and restoring it will be no easy task...

...Of course I had some misgivings: the Tiananmen demonstrations had been going on since mid-April, and, in the face of the protesters' call for Premier Li Peng to step down, the government had declared martial law on May 20...

...The Hong Kong papers spoke ominously of a force of two to three hundred thousand troops encircling the capital...

...It is not only that the summer's protests and foreign sanctions will hurt China's staggering economy...

...Switch the channel and there was Yuan Mu, Beijing's spokesman, insisting to reporters that nothing much had happened...

...By May 1949, when the People's Liberation Army swept into the city, Shanghai had never fulfilled its earlier promise...

...The Peace Hotel and the Friendship Store, usually bursting with tourists, were as empty as tombs...

...When my daughter telephoned on Sunday, it was the first I heard of the violence in Beijing that had begun a few hours earlier...

...The pessimists, on the other hand, see China's backwardness and China's economic problems spreading like a wet gray blanket over Hong Kong itself...