CAPITALIST HAVEN: Pudong (above) is home to more than half the Fortune 500; consumerism is Red China's new refrain

Birds, those feathered messengers of hope, are significant by their absence in China. In the 1960s, the Chinese government considered them a threat to crops and ordered their extermination. By 1990, there was just one bird species, the sparrow, extant in all China. Circa 2002, the Chinese do not really need birds; there are enough symbols of hope to go around.

Hope stares back at you from glass and chrome highrises that abound in urban China-the east coast mainly, but signs of urban renewal are evident even in smaller cities like Datong. A construction boom has accompanied the 22-year-old Chinese experiment with market reforms. "The Chinese are big on replacing old buildings with bigger ones," says Rakesh Sharma, the chief representative of the State Bank of India in Shanghai, the city with an almost-Stalinist frailty for buildings that nudge the clouds.

BARE NECESSITIES? Not quite, the Chinese want houses and cars, not democracy

It is visible urban renewal such as this that belies recent reports that the Chinese economy is not growing by the 7 per cent-plus the Government claims. "It is hard to say the economy isn't growing when you look at what's happening on the ground," says Laurence Brahm, chief executive of Naga Group, a Beijing-based consulting firm. And it is visible urban renewal, among other things, that sets apart China from India. Even the pockets of urban advancement in India-Gurgaon in Delhi, Whitefield in Bangalore, and the Bandra-Kurla complex in Mumbai-pale into insignificance against statistics from beyond the wall. A million square feet commercial complex, Asia's largest, in Beijing's arterial Chang An avenue. Over 20,000 highrises that have mushroomed in Shanghai in the past decade, a number that remains impressive even after it is discounted for Chinese overstatement.

Reformer Zhu is the Chinese people's great hope for the economy.

By 2001, the Chinese were saving $790 trillion.

That gilt-edged bubble of a city, Shanghai, even boasts a mini-city of hope. This is Pudong, where hope soars as high as the world's third tallest television tower, or its highest hotel, the Grand Hyatt, which occupies the top 38 floors of an 88-storey, 370-m-tall building. Nothing about Pudong is small: it occupies an area of 522 sq km, is home to two million people and has attracted over $40 billion (Rs 1,95,000 crore) in foreign direct investment (FDI) since its creation in the early 1990s. Pudong is probably bigger than business warrants, and it certainly does not require the new international airport it now has, but the Shanghainese are building for the future, not the present.

Hope cries out to you, from black-topped expressways, 25,000 km of which have come up since 1998. This has contributed to China's 1.87 trillion yuan (Rs 11,03,821 crore) debt. Only, the Chinese have a different way of looking at that. "I will leave behind the next government 2.5 trillion yuan (Rs 14,75,696 crore) of excellent assets which will generate significant economic and social benefits," said Premier Zhu Rongji at the ninth National People's Congress held at Beijing in March 2002.

Expressways, new power plants and 24x7 ports have brought in FDI-$48 billion in 2001-but they have also contributed to a fiscal deficit estimated to touch 309.8 billion yuan (Rs 1,82,868 crore) this year. India's fiscal deficit in 2001-2 was Rs 1,35,524 crore, but the country managed to attract a mere $2.1 billion in FDI.

If the Government isn't worried, it is because the domestic economy is strong and the Chinese save 700-800 billion yuan every year; by 2001-end gross savings totalled a staggering 6,500 trillion yuan (Rs 3,83,68,11,009 crore). A country that saves as much must believe in the concept of tomorrow.

Hope grins back at you, sometimes toothlessly, at Beijing's sprawling flower and birds market. People over the age of 65 account for close to 7 per cent of China's population. Most live with their children, on government pension and try and kill time by raising flowers or birds.

The single-child norm is coming back to haunt the Chinese: rising life expectancy means a couple in their mid-30s would have to support two sets of parents, all surviving ancestors, and one child. India has a familial safety net; China has none. And the absence of a social safety net could prevent people from spending, or eat into savings, or both. All these would have disastrous consequences. The Chinese are aggressively building a social safety net to pre-empt this: employees pay 53 per cent of the cost of an employee to the government against social security.

Hope drives you around in Shanghai, where former steel workers have been rehabilitated as cabbies in a government-owned company. "We retrain workers in state-owned enterprises (SOE) for employment in the tertiary sector," says Liu Jin Ping, Shanghai's vice-chairman, Foreign Economic Relations and Trade Commission. Bao Steel, where some of the cabbies work, is now a successful case study in SOE-restructuring. With 150 million people employed in SOEs, the services sector is the great white hope of the Chinese.

How big a hope becomes evident in Beijing's shopping district Wangfujing, where retail outlets-some, Starbucks, Valentino, BMW, are straight out of the First World-employ young salespeople, mostly women, from rural China. China will need to create between 2.3 and 2.7 million jobs each year and every little bit helps.

Whether it is Wangfujing in Beijing or Shanghai's Nanjing Street (it caters to a million visitors a day), the young are everywhere. As is an element of sleaze. Young girls offer to take you to see Chinese art, an altogether Oriental take on "Do you want to come up and see my etchings?" Respectable-looking men in suits extend an invitation to "lady-bars". And in Shanghai, an endless display of taxi-girls throngs the Bund at night, each suggesting you hop on for a ride.

There's another sound on the streets, though. It isn't the silent swish of American- and German-made cars barrelling down expressways (for the record, the VW Passat and the Audi A6, both in black, are today's favourites). Nor is it the noise generated by close to 160 million Chinese, not the quietest of people, speaking all at once, into cellular handsets.

This is the clatter of commerce, the aural accompaniment to people eating out, shopping for the Chinese New Year, buying cars and houses, saving for the future, and creating wealth. From politicos to consultants, most Chinese explain this by paraphrasing Deng Xiaoping's remark about allowing some people to get rich first.

Inherent in that approval of Mammon worship is the belief that the protests at Tiananmen Square were as much a cry for a market economy as for democracy. By getting people to focus on economic advancement, goes the theory, the government managed to push democracy down the average Chinese's priority-list.

English could change that. China is filled with English teachers from the UK, Canada, the US and Australia-the countries classified by the Chinese as "native English speaking". There are retired teachers from Birmingham, students who have taken a year off from college in the American West Coast and mid-career pros from Australia. English and the Internet-the Government says there is no censorship, but it is impossible to access CNN.com directly-could bring in notions of free will and self-determination.

China's future, then, depends on two things: its ability to keep the economy ticking, and the success of the asset management companies it has created in cleaning up the estimated 3.6-4.2 trillion yuan (Rs 21,25,003- 24,79,170 crore) bad loans-half the country's GDP-in its financial sector. That, coupled with the Government's recent call to businesses to "Go West" to the underdeveloped parts of the country, will ensure that the benefits of the market economy percolate to the poorest. If that doesn't happen then social unrest, such as recent workers' strikes in the north-east, could become endemic and the Middle Kingdom could face its moment of reckoning. Could that happen? Maybe, maybe not, but there are eight species of birds in China today.