ABSTRACT
Drawn by a personal interest in old British colonial ports and aprofessional, scholarly one in the history of global communism (China’sCommunist Party was born here in 1921), I first visited Shanghai as a back-packing tourist in the summer of 1991. I passed a few days in the old Astor House Hotel, marketed in its heyday as “the Waldorf-Astoria of Shanghai.” The Astor House, or rather the Pujiang Hotel as it was known when I stayed there, had recently been converted into an international youth hostel by the People’s Municipal Government, which then managed all of the socialist city’s real estate. The hotel’s large residential rooms, which had originally housed visiting British Empire types and American businessmen, politicians, and reporters, were now all broken up into single-sex dormitories. Each dreary-looking room held perhaps twenty iron-frame beds, but two-story banquet rooms glimpsed through locked hallway doors hinted at the hotel’s long-gone sumptuousness.
