Matt Gross: Footloose in Spain’s Capital of Style, Barcelona

HOSTEL, a fellow tourist once warned me, is Dutch for “Bring your own towel!”

Actually, she used stronger language, and her hostility was so raw that I began to squirm. Her comment came to mind last May, when I began planning a cheap weekend trip to Barcelona, Spain’s capital of sophisticated style and consumption. Visions of design hotels danced in my head, alongside images of the fantastical science-lab cuisine and ultrafashionable footwear that I imagined were every Barcelonan’s birthright.

But a weekend at, say, Casa Camper, the boutique hotel (215 euros a night, about $280 at $1.30 to the euro) run by the shoemaker of the same name, would have gutted my entire weekend budget of $500. And I had to banish any thought of eating at El Bulli, where the 20-course tasting menu of black-olive waffles and rose foam (165 euros) has earned its owner, Ferran Adrià, a reputation as the world’s greatest chef (or at least its most innovative).

Worse, every hotel I could afford was booked. Desperate, I posted a plea for a “hip but cheap” place on Superfuture.com, an online forum for style hounds. The reply came back quickly: the 24-room Hostal Gat Raval. I shuddered. A hostel? No, a design hostel. Skeptical, but enchanted by the price (42 euros a night) and location (right behind the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona), I gave it a shot. I would have to share a bathroom, but that bathroom might very well have Philippe Starck fixtures — and I wouldn’t even have to bring my own towel.

So one Friday last May, I found myself hauling my suitcase down a narrow Barcelona street, into a dim foyer and up two flights of stairs. An inauspicious start, but Gat Raval turned out to be quite nice: the lobby was bright (white and Kermit the Frog green), and my room was cheery, with a sink, full-length mirror and petite balcony facing the sunlit street. After relaxing for 15 minutes, I left to explore the Raval neighborhood, but not before examining the hallway bathrooms — no Starck, but functional and clean. It would do.

Raval had been described to me as the equivalent of Manhattan’s East Village, a bohemian area where young artists, musicians and designers congregated. And indeed, the people I saw on the streets were all trendily attractive, with vintage sneakers, designer boots or flip-flops on their feet. Mesmerized, I spent a good hour observing them on the plaza in front of the museum, where they sunned themselves on the warm slate while skateboarders kick-flipped around them.

All that people-watching made me hungry, so I popped into Mamacafé, around the corner on Carrer Doctor Dou. In a sleek dining room painted in sunset colors, I devoured tart and garlicky gazpacho, a fried egg over patatas bravas (the spicy Catalan home fries) and lemon sorbet — all made with ingredients from La Boqueria, the famous marketplace that dates back to the 13th century. A glass of red wine, included in the set menu, and an espresso brought the bill to 10.55 euros — far less than I’d expected for such a fresh, filling meal.

I waddled back to the Museu d’Art Contemporani, where 6 euros opened the doors to both the permanent collection (ho-hum Cy Twomblys and Philip Gustons) and a special exhibition of pop music albums, from Patti Smith’s “Horses” by Robert Mapplethorpe to Raymond Pettibon’s covers for Black Flag. As I stood at a listening station, I realized this was just what I’d hoped to find — the coolest of pop culture treated as high art.

With culture under my belt, I made my obligatory visit to La Rambla, the parklike pedestrian thoroughfare that leads to the harbor. This was once the epicenter of Barcelona street life, a place for performers, protestors and, in the 1970’s and 80’s, prostitutes and drug addicts. But since the 1992 Summer Olympics, the area has been cleaned up — or, to some, Disneyfied à la Times Square. People in overly elaborate costumes (witches and knights figured heavily that day) strolled next to gawking tourists while boisterous groups of perpetually tipsy bachelorettes who routinely wing in from England on easyJet and Ryanair snapped up sombreros from street vendors. Sombreros!

Luckily, I was soon rescued by George, an American expatriate I’d met through a friend. We hurried over to Irati, a narrow tapas bar far enough from the Rambla to discourage most tourists. The bartender poured us glasses of Txakoli (pronounced cha-ko-LEE), a dry white wine from the Basque region, as we sampled the toothpick-skewered tapas piled before us: bread slathered with goat cheese, anchovy crostini and olives (1.50 euros each).

I told George about my frugal mission. He laughed. I was in the wrong place, he said — the Catalans drive a hard bargain. “Look,” he added, as the bartender counted our used toothpicks to compute the bill (14.10 euros), “you’ll never see that in Madrid.”

As night fell, George led me through El Barri Gòtic, a knotty old neighborhood of brick alleys and squares fronting medieval churches. Miró had lived here, as had a teenage Picasso, whose second-floor window remains. No sooner was I completely lost than George announced he had to leave; his wife expected him home for dinner. I stumbled my way to a main road and caught a taxi to meet Alex, another friend of a friend.

Our plan was to feed off of El Bulli’s glamour by eating at Inopia, a much-cheaper tapas bar run by Mr. Adrià’s brother, Albert. But Alex, a Catalan-speaking local, wanted to make sure I also saw Barcelona’s darker side.

He lured me into L’Ovella Negra, a cavernous bar full of foreign students, all immeasurably drunk on 1.20-euro draft beers (or, as www.ovellanegra.com puts it, “beeeeeeeeer”). Alex explained that, back in his university days, this had been his primary haunt. We stayed for a couple of rounds, quietly mourning our passing youth, when a blotto Irish girl mistook us for Frenchmen and introduced us to her friends as Pierre and François. It was our cue to leave.

Too bad it hadn’t come sooner. By the time we arrived at Inopia, at the civilized hour of 11:30 p.m., the kitchen was inexplicably and disturbingly closed. We went across the street to the utterly empty Rossell and ate uninspiring cheese-and-mushroom fondue (16 euros each). I was back at the Gat by 1 a.m. and drifted off, pondering the meaning of inopia: clueless.

Less than four hours later, my alarm clock screamed. I had a mission: to watch La Boqueria wake up. Anyone can browse the market’s jam-packed stalls in the day, but I wanted to go behind the scenes to get a vendor’s-eye view of the action. When I arrived at 5, butchers were slicing whole pigs into pork chops, fishmongers were arraying glistening sheets of crushed ice and greengrocers were erecting rainbow ziggurats of apples, oranges, tomatoes, cherries, peppers and pears. Best of all, I was the only tourist.

La Boqueria is also a great place to grab a cheap breakfast. After taking a million photos, I ordered a cortado (a small strong coffee with a small amount of milk) and croissant (2 euros) at Pinotxo, one of the handful of tapas bars. By 6, serious shoppers were starting to crowd in, and I was already exhausted.

So I returned to the hostel for a nap; I’d need more sleep and a shower if I wanted to keep up with late-night Barcelona. But I’d forgotten that unwritten rule of hostels: last one into the shower is a rotten egg. The drain was clogged, and the stall was so tiny that I burned my forearm on a hot water pipe. I emerged feeling dirtier than I did going in.

Still, I was glad for the rest. The weather was perfect and the hostel desk clerk insisted I visit Parc Güell, up in the hills overlooking the city. The park was designed by Antoni Gaudí, whose avant-garde architecture is evident everywhere, from the animal-themed fountains to the cracked-tile benches undulating around the Plaça del Teatre Grec.

The park also contains Gaudí’s house, now a museum of his designs (admission is 4 euros). But the greatest work of Barcelona’s most famous architect lies down the hill at La Sagrada Familia, the über-ambitious church he spent 43 years building — without ever finishing. (Other architects have carried on the work, now projected to be completed in 2022.) Admission was 8 euros, but by showing my Gaudí museum ticket, I got in for 5. I gaped at the bifurcating columns, which imitate the natural structure of tree trunks, and marveled at the postmodern grid of the surrounding scaffolding. The contrast made my heart soar, but not in the way that Gaudí, a devout and conservative Catholic, probably intended.

For a moment, I considered climbing the stairs to get a view from the spires, but after walking around all day, my feet hurt. It was time to replace my beat-up Merrells. A 5-euro taxi ride brought me to El Born, the SoHo to Raval’s East Village, full of chichi boutiques and trendy restaurants. None, however, carried the shoes I wanted, at least nothing under 150 euros.

By now, the sun was setting, and I wondered where the day had gone. Sure, I’d spent so little, but I had seen so little, too — I wished I could buy an extra half day with my remaining wad. So I splurged on a cab and headed back to Inopia.

I arrived to find George, his wife, Lucie, and their friend David standing at Inopia’s sidewalk counter. Inside, the fluorescent-lighted space looked more like an industrial kitchen than the restaurant of a semifamous chef. But that’s Inopia’s point: straightforward tapas, without foams, airs or mummified mackerels. Over glasses of Sierra Cantabria and bottles of Moritz pilsner, we nibbled textbook-perfect patatas bravas, a plate of olives that spanned the flavor spectrum from bitter to sweet to spicy, and a torta cañarejal — a block of cheese so liquid and rich you could drink it like buttermilk.

But better than this food, better even than the price (somehow, my share came only to 25 euros), was the clubby atmosphere. Throughout the night, friends of George and Lucie would swing by and gossip in English, Spanish or Catalan, and I began to appreciate Barcelona’s true attraction. It isn’t necessarily the museums or restaurants, but its cosmopolitan people, vibrant street life and Paris-meets-Miami architecture that makes the city exciting. The sophistication I’d been seeking wasn’t something I needed to spend a lot of money to find.

I awoke the next morning to twin unpleasantries: once again, I was not the first to the shower, but worse, it was Sunday and all the stores were closed — no chance to drop my extra euros on a pair of awesome kicks. Instead, I ate lunch at Origen 99.9%, a minichain of bistros devoted to traditional Catalan recipes like baby octopus in chocolate sauce and Monserrat tomatoes stuffed with cheese and anchovies. Lunch was delicious and, at 15.57 euros, affordable. But despite my epiphany the previous night, I couldn’t get past my failure to find new shoes.

Disappointed, I shuffled down to the beach, possibly Barcelona’s most picturesque feature. Right there, at the edge of Barceloneta, a dense urban neighborhood, was a golden field of sand whose beauty was matched only by that of the young people sprawled across it. I dropped my bag and towel near a trio of topless women (I couldn’t help it, there were so many), kicked off my worn-out shoes and walked into the Mediterranean, my pockets full and my feet bare.

TOTAL 341.10 euros, including taxis; two 1.20-euro subway rides; the books “Gaudí’s Barcelona” and Robert Hughes’s definitive “Barcelona”; and a 70-euro pair of super-cool Castañer espadrilles, which, alas, I bought in Italy — not at the company’s shop in Barcelona.

VISITOR INFORMATION

WHERE TO STAY

Hostal Gat Raval, Joaquin Costa 44; (34-93) 481-6670; www.gataccommodation.com. If the Web site lists no vacancies, try www.bootsnall.com, a booking resource for backpackers.

Hostal Gat Xino, Hospital 155; (34-93) 324-8833; www.gataccommodation.com.

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK

Inopia Classic Bar, Tamarit 104; (34-93) 424-5231; www.barinopia.com.

Irati, Cardenal Casanyes 17; (34-93) 302-3084.

Mamacafé, Doctor Dou 10; (34-93) 301-2940.

Origen 99.9%, four locations; www.origen99.com.

Rossell, Tamarit 109; (34-93) 424-1505.

La Cova Fumada, Baluard 56; (34-93) 221-4061. Hidden in the wafer-thin buildings of Barceloneta, La Cova Fumada is a slice of old-school Catalonia with a kitchen that produces workingmen’s classics like butifarra sausage, bombas (potato and meat croquettes) and cod in myriad forms.

WHERE TO SHOP

Castañer, Mestre Nicolau 23; (34-93) 414-2428; www.castaner.com.

La Boqueria, Plaça de la Boqueria; (34-93) 318-2584; www.boqueria.info. Closed Sundays.

Nubius, Espaseria 7; (34-93) 319-1006; and Avinyó 21; (34-93) 304-2420; www.nubius.es. The shop embroiders T-shirts and button-downs with images like a skyscraper wrapped in alien tentacles.

Ras, Doctor Dou 10; (34-93) 412-7199; www.rasbcn.com. It features design books and magazines and has a gallery for the work of art-minded architects.

Tags: travel, spain, barcelona

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Jim Yardley: Dead Bachelors in Remote China Still Find Wives

CHENJIAYUAN, China — For many Chinese, an ancestor is someone to honor, but also someone whose needs must be maintained. Families burn offerings of fake money or paper models of luxury cars in case an ancestor might need pocket change or a stylish ride in the netherworld.

But here in the parched canyons along the Yellow River known as the Loess Plateau, some parents with dead bachelor sons will go a step further. To ensure a son’s contentment in the afterlife, some grieving parents will search for a dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the pair together as a married couple.

“They happen pretty often, especially when teenagers or younger people die,” said Yang Husheng, 48, a traveling funeral director in the region who said he last attended such a funeral in the spring. “It’s quite common. I’ve been in the business for seven or eight years, and I’ve seen all sorts of things.”

The rural folk custom, startling to Western sensibilities, is known as minghun, or afterlife marriage. Scholars who have studied it say it is rooted in the Chinese form of ancestor worship, which holds that people continue to exist after death and that the living are obligated to tend to their wants — or risk the consequences. Traditional Chinese beliefs also hold that an unmarried life is incomplete, which is why some parents worry that an unmarried dead son may be an unhappy one.

In random interviews in different villages across the Loess Plateau, which spreads across parts of Shanxi and Shaanxi Provinces, everyone acknowledged the custom. People say parents of a dead son depend on an informal network of friends or family, or even a well-connected fixer, to locate a family that has recently lost a single daughter. Selling or buying corpses for commercial purposes is illegal in China, but these individual transactions, usually for cash, seem to fall into a fuzzier category and are quietly arranged between families.

In some villages, a son is eligible for such a spouse if he is 12 or older when he dies. None of the people interviewed considered the custom shameful or overly macabre. Instead, it was described as a parental duty to a lost child that reflected Confucian values about loyalty to family.

“Parents have a sense of responsibility for their son,” said one woman, Li Yinlan. She said she had attended ceremonies where the coffins were placed side by side and musicians played a dirge. “They have this custom everywhere,” she said of her region.

The Communist Party has tried, with mixed success, to stamp out beliefs it considers to be superstition. But the continued practice of the ancient custom in the Loess Plateau is a testament to the region’s extreme isolation. In other parts of rural China, it is difficult to know how often, if at all, the custom is followed.

The Loess Plateau, a dense warren of eroding canyons where some villages are unreachable by roads, is separated from much of the change stirring up China. Many young people have fled the arid hills, while those left behind struggle to raise a crop. Many of the men left behind also struggle to find a wife.

The reason is that many women have left for work in cities, never to return, while those women who remain can afford to be picky. No family would approve of a daughter marrying a man too poor to afford a dowry and a decent future. Families of the poorest bachelor sons sometimes pool their savings to buy a wife from bride sellers, the traveling brokers who lure, trick or sometimes kidnap women from other regions and then illegally sell them into marriage.

In the tiny village of Chenjiayuan, a farmer named Chen Xingwu, 57, stabbed a spade into his field overlooking the Yellow River and said minghun represented the final effort by parents to find a bride for a son. He said the parents of a local disabled man were so worried their son would die before finding a spouse that they recently gave a gold ring and earrings to a woman’s family to secure her as a bride.

Mr. Chen said his own marriage, at 35, was a lucky stroke, coming after he lobbied the family of a younger woman in another village. It allowed him to have three children and carry on his family name. But he said the pool of available brides was limited, a scarcity that increased their value — an irony, given that some rural families, conscious of China’s one-child policy, abort female fetuses before birth or abandon newborn girls.

“For girls, it doesn’t matter about their minds, whether they are an idiot or not,” he said. “They are still wanted as brides.” Dead or alive, he added, as he peered at the river.

“There are girls who have drowned in the river down there,” he said. “When their bodies have washed up, their families could get a couple of thousand yuan for them.”

Villagers and Mr. Yang, the funeral director, said a family searching for a female corpse typically must pay more than 10,000 yuan, or about $1,200, almost four years of income for an average farmer. Families of the bride regard the money as the dowry they would have received had death not intervened.

The existence of such a market for brides has led to scattered reports of grave robbing. This year, a man in Shaanxi Province captured two men trying to dig up the body of his wife, according to a local news account. In February, a woman from Yangquan tried to buy the remains of a dead 15-year-old girl, abandoned at a hospital in another city, to satisfy her unmarried deceased brother. She said the brother’s ghost was invading her dreams and demanding a wife, according to a news account.

Guo Yuhua, a sociology professor at Qinghua University in Beijing, an expert on folk traditions and burial customs in the Loess Plateau, said the minghun custom stemmed from both dread and sympathy for the dead. She said parents with dead daughters, like those with dead sons, were also carrying out an obligation to their child. They will sell their bodies as a way of finding them a place in a Chinese society where tradition dictates that a daughter has no place on her father’s family tree.

“China is a paternal clan culture,” said Professor Guo, who did postdoctoral work in anthropology at Harvard. “A woman does not belong to her parents. She must marry and have children of her own before she has a place among her husband’s lineage. A woman who dies unmarried has no place in this world.”

Pinpointing the origins of minghun is difficult, but scholars have found allusions to the practice in different ancient texts, including the Rites of Zhou, a guidebook of appropriate Confucian behavior written around the third century B.C. Commentators on the Confucian classics have argued that the ancient educated elite disapproved of the custom.

Yet Professor Guo emphasized that the values of Confucianism, later blended with Buddhism and Taoism, are the basis of folk customs like minghun, which share a reverence for family.

In the village of Qinjiagelao, where roughly one in four eligible men are unmarried, Qin Yuxing, 80, is a genial grandfather unashamed of the minghun practice or the fact that he bought living brides for both his sons.

His younger son, now 40, had tried to find a spouse but the family was too poor. The elder Mr. Qin saved his money and bought a bride from a man who showed up at a local market offering a woman for $500. The woman bore Mr. Qin’s son a child and then left three years ago to visit her family — and never came back.

“People aren’t willing to come here,” the elder Mr. Qin said to explain why he was willing to purchase a woman for his son. His village is perched atop a cliff and had no road until last year. Women often face backbreaking work. Mr. Qin said similar pressures weighed on a neighboring family after their unmarried son died in a gas explosion more than a decade ago. That family spent $500 for an afterlife marriage, he said. Mr. Qin’s wife, Cao Guoxiang, 76, recalled another case involving parents buying a dead bride for their unmarried son, a trucker who died in an accident.

She said the size of afterlife ceremonies depended on a family’s wealth. “Poor people just bring the bodies over and put them in the earth,” she said. “People with money will have a reception and slaughter a pig or a sheep for friends.”

She added: “It’s superstition and religion. People live as couples. If they die, they should live as a couple, too.”

And that is why families too poor to afford a minghun bride also follow a similar custom in some villages: They make a figure of straw and bury it beside a dead son as the spouse he never had.

Tags: china, tradition

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Nicholas D. Kristof: Where Gorillas and the Antelope Play

The first thing they tell you here is not to play with the gorillas or the elephants.

A young male elephant gored a young Italian woman here when he attempted to play with her. And if you creep too close to the gorillas, a 375-pound silverback will charge you and, if you're lucky, stop inches from you and slap the ground in rage.

But even if you can't play with the animals, you can ogle them -- and there are few places in the world as good for that as this remote jungle where the Central African Republic, Cameroon and the Congo Republic come together. And now the three countries have joined forces to preserve this jungle by establishing adjoining national parks that cover an area the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

It's part of a growing trend that deserves strong support from the West: poor countries seeking economic opportunities by protecting nature rather than pillaging it. The grandest and most unlikely of these experiments is this one, for the Central African Republic may be the single most wretched country in the world: life expectancy is 38, and every year it falls by another six months. One-fifth of children die by the age of 5. Outside the capital, government is only a rumor.

Yet while many national parks in Africa exist primarily on paper, this one is real. Game wardens patrol vigorously: they pursue poachers across international borders, and seized 70,000 snares last year alone.

This is the only place in the world to see western lowland gorillas (even more elusive than the mountain gorillas of Rwanda). Casey Parks, the student journalist traveling with me, and I spent two hours with 13 gorillas.

We stayed at least 30 feet away to avoid being charged, but there was one moment when our guide froze and whispered to us that a female was asking the silverback to charge us. Fortunately, the silverback adopted a typical husband's approach in dealing with a demanding wife: he pretended he didn't hear.

The World Wildlife Fund is nurturing this attempt to develop ecotourism. It has a team, including American student volunteers, hanging out with gorillas all day every day, habituating them so that tourists can see them.

It's a delicate balance, for the tourists could bring diseases that would kill gorillas. It may also be more difficult for a silverback to entice females into his harem if humans are around. Yet if the gorillas can lure rich Westerners here, ecotourism could become a more sustainable economic pillar than slash-and-burn logging. For now, fewer than 1,000 foreigners visit the park each year.

Many Africans resent the parks, partly because they allocate vast resources to saving animals for rich foreigners to enjoy -- in regions where humans routinely die for lack of a few dollars.

''That's where conservation got it wrong in the past,'' said Chloe Cipolletta, an Italian who has lived with the gorillas for the last nine years. It's crucial, she said, that conservation programs benefit people as well as animals, and so the WWF has hired 31 of the local Bayaka Pygmies as trackers and guides, and others earn money by showing tourists how to catch antelope with nets.

The first night I arrived here, crossing a river from Cameroon in a canoe and then jouncing over ruts to get to a Pygmy village, I was led to somebody I thought was a local chief -- and then he stepped from the darkness and turned out to be a tall white man who greeted me in very American English. Louis Sarno, originally from New Jersey, explained that he once heard Pygmy music on the radio and was so entranced that he made a visit 20 years ago -- and stayed.

Mr. Sarno married a local woman and learned the language. He endures bouts with malaria, goes on weeks-long hunting trips in the jungle with the others, and fits in remarkably well (except that he's a lousy spear hunter).

Now he has become a fierce advocate for the ''forest people,'' as Pygmies often prefer to be called. Mr. Sarno notes that logging has benefited corrupt leaders while doing nothing for the villagers, and so he welcomes the ecotourism experiment as a last best hope for local people.

Africa can be a grim continent, and the news usually focuses on genocide, corruption and disease. But in the audacious dream to preserve this rain forest and the way of life of people in it, you see Africa's glory, fighting to survive.

Sep 26, 2006. pg. A.23

Tags: africa

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Joseph Kahn: Shanghai Party Boss Held for Corruption

BEIJING, Monday, Sept. 25 — Chinese security officers have detained the powerful party boss of Shanghai for corruption, as President Hu Jintao expands a crackdown on graft that has focused on prominent political opponents.

Chen Liangyu, the Communist Party’s top official in the wealthy East Coast enclave and a member of the ruling Politburo, was formally detained on Sunday afternoon, Chinese state media confirmed Monday afternoon.

It is exceedingly rare in China for members of the ruling Politburo to face legal trouble, even when the authorities have evidence of corrupt activities by them or people close to them. Mr. Hu almost certainly would not have approved of the action unless he considered Mr. Chen an obstacle to his political control or his policy agenda.

The action seems intended mainly to reduce local resistance to edicts by Mr. Hu and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, while also smashing the remnants of the political clique that had been tied more closely to Jiang Zemin, China’s former paramount leader, than to Mr. Hu.

Mr. Hu is seeking to reshuffle the members of the Politburo and all the leading government and provincial posts at the 17th Party Congress to be held next year. He has sought to extinguish opposition to his priorities among senior party members ahead of that event and to anoint his own successor.

Mr. Chen’s political machine has long been considered one of the strongest and most corrupt in a country where the powerful find ways to claim a big share of the country’s prosperity, despite almost constant anti-corruption campaigns within the ruling party.

As Shanghai party boss, Mr. Chen enjoyed considerable leeway to run China’s wealthiest urban region. Friends and relatives of Mr. Chen are suspected of using access to public funds, including Shanghai’s pension fund, to enrich themselves, people informed about the investigation said. They said at least half a dozen other officials and many prominent local deal makers have also been arrested in recent weeks.

Mr. Chen, 60, inherited the political base of Mr. Jiang, who rose to prominence as Shanghai party boss in the 1980’s and subsequently promoted many of his cohorts to top national party and government posts. He was once seen as having the potential to join the Politburo Standing Committee and compete for China’s top political titles.

The so-called Shanghai faction did not operate like a cohesive political clique in recent years and failed to help Mr. Jiang himself retain his final post as military chief in 2004, when Mr. Hu forced him into retirement and consolidated his own power.

But Mr. Chen resisted central government demands to reduce speculative real estate investment and tamp down economic growth to prevent waste and overheating. He offered a prominent symbol of the strength of local party machines even in the face of heavy pressure from the Beijing leadership, so his downfall seems likely to signal Mr. Hu’s rising authority.

The last time a sitting Politburo member lost his post for corruption was in 1995, when Mr. Jiang, then China’s top leader, purged Chen Xitong, the Beijing party chief Mr. Jiang considered a formidable rival.

Chen Liangyu, who is not related to Chen Xitong, was detained under “double regulations,” a form of house arrest for members of the Communist Party suspected of wrongdoing. Such detentions do not necessarily lead to legal charges, but after losing the confidence of the top leadership, Mr. Chen will almost certainly be stripped of his political posts.

His detention is a black mark for Shanghai, which China has built into a showcase market economy and financial center in an attempt to present its most sophisticated face to the outside world.

The ongoing investigation into corruption provided a glimpse into another side of the city’s stunning growth. Mr. Chen’s political machine controlled a great swathe of Shanghai’s economy, including prime portions of real estate and major infrastructure projects.

A huge investigation by the central government into corruption there focused on the misuse of pension funds to invest in building projects tied to local leaders and their business cohorts.

But Mr. Chen, his relatives and friends were also implicated in a major real estate scandal in 2003 that resulted in a short prison term for one well-connected Shanghai businessman, Zhou Zhengyi, but did not focus on Mr. Chen or officials close to him directly. Issues related to the handling of that investigation were revived during the latest crackdown, people informed about the investigation said.

Mr. Hu’s corruption crackdown began last spring and picked up pace during the summer months. It has so far resulted in the arrests of lower-level officials and well-connected businessmen in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Fujian and other areas.

Most of the people implicated in the scandals are viewed as old loyalists of Mr. Jiang or members of the Politburo not considered among the core supporters of Mr. Hu, leading to suspicions that Mr. Hu has used the fight against corruption as a tool to eliminate opponents.

Some party officials acknowledge that it is rare for officials in China to climb the political ladder without quietly securing economic benefits for themselves or their friends and relatives. The party-run security apparatus usually does not seek to stop such behavior unless the officials in question fall from political favor, they say.

Tags: china, shanghai, corruption

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Howard W. French: Scandals Emerging in Shanghai as Political Season Nears

In a reversal of fortunes that may say as much about Chinese power politics as it does about corruption, China's richest commercial city has come under investigation by the central government for a huge pension fraud scheme.

So far, the budding scandal, which has been written about in unusual detail in the country's news media, has ensnared the chief of the city's Labor and Social Security Bureau, or pension fund, along with the chairman of the Shanghai Electric Group, a municipal utility.

The two, along with the heads of at least two of the city's districts, including a former top aide to the city's Communist Party leader, have been taken to Nanjing, where they are being held by investigators for interrogation.

Meanwhile, the presence of more than 100 investigators from the party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, who have been sent here from Beijing and have taken up residence in a historic old hotel, has fed widespread speculation that the arrest or demotion of others, possibly including more senior municipal and party officials, may follow.

The Chinese government routinely bans publication of articles on subjects it deems sensitive or embarrassing, so the widespread reporting on the scandal here has led many to conclude that it is the first act in what may be a long season of political jockeying leading up to the 17th Communist Party Congress next year, in which the next generation of national leaders will be selected.

In recent years Shanghai appeared to be all but immune to high-level scandals, with the city's leaders benefiting from the patronage of Jiang Zemin, the country's former leader, who rose to national prominence as mayor of the city and cultivated it as a power base.

Indeed, three years ago a large team of investigators descended from Beijing to look into collusion between officials and real estate developers, only to be recalled abruptly to Beijing, reportedly at Mr. Jiang's insistence.

That scandal began with residents' claims that they had been forced to relocate after developers secured rights to their land through illegal payments to city officials. After the investigation was quashed, the news media were ordered not to write about corrupt land deals, and the lawyer for the displaced residents, Zheng Enchong, was jailed for contacting international human rights groups.

But with Mr. Jiang having relinquished the last of his important titles in 2004, many here say, the way has been opened for a new investigation that many see as an attack on Mr. Jiang's old power base by allies of a younger generation of leaders.

In the current scandal, according to reports in the Chinese news media, city officials arranged for $1.2 billion of municipal pension funds to be lent to an obscure private holding company for investment in a toll expressway between Shanghai and the nearby city of Hangzhou.

Chinese journalists who have reported on the case say the loan was nearly paid off when employees at the highway company informed on their superiors, bringing the arrangement to light.

Chinese news reports have said that if the investigators are allowed to pursue their work to its conclusion, the highway deal may in the end prove to be a modest piece of a much larger web of corruption linking city officials, banks and developers.

The newsweekly Caijing, for example, has carried detailed reports of how money from the city's Social Security Bureau was funneled into private real estate projects as long ago as the early 1990's.

''At the center of the issue is the bureau's dual role as both administrative regulator and investment manager of the fund, despite public demand to entrust the fund to market-oriented operators,'' the magazine wrote in a cover story on the scandal. ''The monopoly it created is at the root of the fund's current problems.''

Besides weakening the city's national political standing, the pension scandal constitutes a blow to Shanghai's ambition to emerge as China's pre-eminent financial center. As with the suppressed real estate scandal, the reported pension dealings highlight the lack of transparency in a system in which the news media and the courts are subjected to political direction.

Sep 5, 2006. pg. A.3

Tags: china, corruption, shanghai