CANTON, China -- At the South Coast Seafood Restaurant, Chinese dwarfs and Nepalese Gurkhas serve as doormen. Pretty young women draped in furs make a show of leading guests to their tables.
Inside the mirrored hall, every table is packed with Hong Kong, Taiwanese and local entrepreneurs, downing imported liquor and mounds of seafood, and cutting deals over their ubiquitous portable phones.
This is China in the 1990s -- specifically Guangdong Province, the heart of what now is hailed as the nation's "Gold Coast." These days, the money-men relentlessly partying at the South Coast have plenty to celebrate.
At a time when the economic growth of the Western world and much of Asia has slowed dramatically, Guangdong Province is booming more than ever.
Guangdong claims the world's fastest-growing economy, no small feat for a region of 63 million people -- more than any European nation except Germany. Annual economic growth here since 1981 has averaged 20 percent. Last year, it topped 27 percent.
In the process, Guangdong has become China's promised land.
Foreign investors have poured billions of dollars into the province. Millions of unemployed rural laborers are flooding in from all over China. U.S. companies for the first time are peddling successfully here everything from baby food to beer.
More than ever, Chinese reformists are touting Guangdong's achievements as the way of the future for this troubled land -- a model presaging profound shifts in China's political and economic realities. The Guangdong boom began with the final rise to power of senior leader Deng Xiaoping, and his historic move in 1978 to reopen China to the world and remake its sinking socialist economy.
For many years more open, independent and entrepreneurial than other Chinese regions, Guangdong embarked on an economic free-for-all:
* The province's economy has grown four times faster than China's most sluggish regions, although a mere 3 percent of its ** investment comes from Beijing. Its per-capita income of $455 a year is China's highest.
* Foreign and private companies, including rural collectives that actually are privately owned, dominate Guangdong's economy -- with state industries' share reduced to 23 percent. Almost 90 percent of the goods sold are free of price controls, far more than anywhere else in China.
'Spiritual pollution'
But with this success story has come soaring crime, prostitution, drug use, Western individualism and official corruption. This "spiritual pollution" -- as it is labeled by Beijing propagandists -- has provided useful fodder for attacks by China's more conservative socialist elders.
These attacks mounted after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Along with a national fiscal austerity campaign, the vitriol cast doubt on the future of Guangdong's experiments.
But with a surprise tour of the province in January by Mr. Deng -- at 87, still China's supreme arbiter of power -- Guangdong's role as China's standard-bearer has been reaffirmed.
Mr. Deng reportedly hailed Guangdong as the next Asian region to industrialize, following the pattern of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea. He called for the rest of China to emulate its economic successes.
The reformist-conservative power struggle in Beijing is far from settled, and meaningful political reforms are not part of that debate. But Mr. Deng's Guangdong trip immediately led to a stream of statements from other Chinese leaders and state news media strongly in favor of accelerating economic liberalization.
The Chinese Communist Party newspaper People's Daily now describes economic development as the true test of socialism. It recently endorsed "the correct understanding and use of capitalism" -- in a significant and abrupt departure from its anti-Western tone of recent years.
With the fall of Soviet communism, the newest line here is this: The party no longer can retain power by leading the masses as the prophet of Marxism, but only by delivering what the people want.
Increasingly, what most Chinese appear to want is what Guangdong has already achieved.
'I long for capitalism'
Jiujiang Township is an average success story for the Pearl River Delta, a triangle bounded by Canton, Macao and Hong Kong.
More than a decade ago, Mr. Deng planted in this fertile basin three of China's first five "special economic zones," the earliest areas to adopt capitalist methods and favorable terms for foreign investors.
These reforms quickly spread to the rest of the delta. Today, half of Guangdong's industrial output stems from there, even though it makes up but a quarter of the province.
In Jiujiang, a backwater in the early 1980s, the changes have been rapid. It used to take a half-day to drive the 35 miles from Canton to the township by a narrow road and a series of ferries. nTC Now the trip takes an hour, speeded partly by a freeway and new bridges.
Jiujiang once had 10 factories. Now it has about 250, offering more jobs than the township's 80,000 residents can fill. Industrial output has increased 36 times.
The township's new roads are clogged with trucks bound for Hong Kong. Large markets -- for furniture, steel pipe, bathroom fixtures -- have cropped up. Residents commonly have built new multistory houses stocked with imported televisions, VCRs and stereos.
"We never dreamed we would eat this well," says Hu Bai Yong, the party secretary at a foreign-funded Jiujiang toy factory, while knocking off a half-bottle of local liquor over a big lunch. "Now everyone here eats this way."
Jiujiang's peasants also probably never dreamed that they would live in a political landscape virtually devoid of Communist ideology.
Hong Kong radio plays in Mr. Hu's factory. Workers watch Hong Kong TV at home -- on imported sets that can't receive the signal from Chinese government stations.
The only banner in Mr. Hu's factory urges workers to "quickly achieve quality and high productivity." Some factories still hold political education sessions, but these stress "how to be a good person," he says. Party cadres now study management techniques rather than the works of Mao Tse-tung.
"The whole cultural and information level here has increased so much that people can analyze for themselves what's correct," Mr. Hu says. "People's thoughts are beyond our control."
Throughout Guangdong, it is much the same: Socialism seems in a state of suspended animation -- a state summarized by a Canton waitress, who declares, "I believe in communism, but I long for capitalism."
Such public nods to the Communist Party still are obligatory, for the party retains the power here to crush anyone. This was underscored in the fall by a Chinese army parade on the anniversary of the nation's founding -- the first such display in Canton since 1984.
But power and ideology are not the same, a state company official and party member stresses. "In Guangdong, even officials don't talk that socialist crap anymore," he says. "They all say we're 'CPs' now -- we're all capitalist pigs."
The evolution of socialism
Guangdong's political economy long has been described by Mr. Deng as "socialism with Chinese characteristics."
Some definition of this ambiguity can be found in the open admiration of many Chinese leaders for Singapore's combination free markets and tight government control, and for the close ties in Korea between government and industry.
Guangdong officials now talk candidly about moving away from socialism, as Eastern Europe has done, although they hope that China's transition will be more orderly.
But if Guangdong is China's post-Communist future, that future may bear the strongest resemblance to what has transpired in Taiwan under the rule of the Communists' rival, the Kuomintang or Chinese nationalists.
Apart from prosperity, Taiwan embraces ugly aspects already apparent in Guangdong: uncontrolled development, a polluted landscape, ineffective government regulations and a culture devoted to money.
"I felt like Rip Van Winkle," says Burton Levin, former U.S. consul general in Hong Kong, who recently returned from Guangdong. "I feel asleep in Taipei in 1970, and I woke up in Guangdong in 1992.
"In both cases, you have an authoritarian system obsessed with the need for stability, being undermined by a huge economic boom producing a population more and more in touch with outside influences.
"Marx is dead in Guangdong and dying in most of China, just the way that [Kuomintang] ideology has become totally irrelevant in Taiwan."
Mr. Levin continues: "What will hold China together is a rising tide of prosperity and the traditional Chinese desire for a ruling authority to ensure order. If the Chinese people continue to believe they are better off than they were, most are not going to demand political freedom.
"And right now, Guangdong basically is satisfying those needs."
TOMORROW MORNING in The Sun: the vulnerable powerhouse.