1980 launched an era of excess, a time when greed was good. Westerners rejected

hippy ideals and professed faith in a space-helmeted near future with their haircuts.

Not so China, naturally. At the dawn of the Me Generation, China was still laboring under the concept that Us was important. In July of 1980, National Geographic’s Bruce Dale wrote a feature article on Shanghai. Here are the choicest tidbits, guaranteed to leave anyone who’s been there lately doing that gentle “My how times change” headshake.

• I suspect that Shanghai’s crime rate is lower than that of major U.S. cities – justice is severe and includes capital punishment – but the admission that there is any crime jolted me. Shanghai people are usually so well behaved in the presence of foreigners that one forgets they are, after all, human. I confess to a thrill at witnessing a fight in a vegetable market: One man mashed into his cauliflower, then rising to deck his adversary.

• I went to the yard by taxi, passing under the Huangpu in a 1,300 meter tunnel. No bridge links the two sides; workers cross by ferry.

• When she had a free minute, I tried to talk to her – not easy in the din. “Do you like this work?” “It is glorious for me to devote myself to the socialist reconstructions,” she said. A crane lowered another fiery cylinder. She climbed back into the locomotive cab and went back to glory.

• Soon after daylight, cyclists began to swarm. Who are all those bikers wearing blue or green people’s jackets? They are everybody. In Shanghai 1.7 million bikes transport factory workers, bureaucrats, even physicians.

• Last year the store sold 14,766 bicycles, 11,424 sewing machines, and 12,509 TV sets. It could have sold more TVs ( a nine inch set retails for $150), but supplies are limited. So is demand.

• “Another student added seriously, “The most important thing is not whether we all have TVs, but how to realize the Four Modernizations.” He ticked off the national goals that everyone seems to have memorized: modernization of agriculture, industry, defense, and science. “If we achieve the Four Modernizations we can have a happy life,” he continued. “I believe that.”

• Rock and disco sounds are foreign to Fudan University. Students don’t date, seldom dance, and the younger ones may not smoke. Questions about beer busts and drugs seem to the Chinese to pertain to some other planet. Students have one purpose: to study (plus a few days of obligatory manual labor each term).

• If the neighborhood committee fails to dissuade a family from having a second child, the “units” where husband and wife work may be brought into action. Mrs. Wang’s committee has also called on work units to help persuade couples not to divorce. She said the neighborhood has a perfect record of zero divorces.

• Pumpkin Lane, consisting of 35 apartment buildings joined by shady sidewalks, is one of Shanghai’s best housing areas. Three rooms cost only six dollars a month.

• You can have any color truck you want, so long as it’s army green. The factory’s administrative chief told me, ‘We may offer light blue orange, or yellow in the future.” Shanghai’s streets would be brightened.

• Grand ideas exist for a subway and an expanded sewage system. But Shanghai isn’t rich.

• In the old city, the Shanghai that existed before foreigners came, the hot water depot substitutes for the tea shop. Almost every block has one – a warm place where people can gather.

• “We are backward,” a Baoshan engineer said, “but we won’t always be.” So hopes Shanghai.