A woman sits in the tiny lobby with her telephone and her jug of disinfectant, and allows you to call upstairs to announce yourself. A tiny, rickety elevator descends, hoists you up a few floors, and deposits you in a long corridor without artificial light. Some illumination enters through windows and glances down the shiny floor, but it's the gloomy steel-gray light of a northern industrial city. You'd never know that Mao Bell takes in over US$7 billion a year and that revenues are growing by something like 60 percent a year.

A bit of a spelunking expedition through these corridors takes you into a classic communist-style meeting room, the kind of place Coleridge might have been thinking of when he wrote of

"caverns measureless to man." In this part of the world, the heavy hitters show up for meetings with large retinues of underlings, and all of them have to have a seat at the table, so the tables go on for miles. I established a foothold in a corner near the door and was met by Gao Kun, director of the import office of the Shanghai PTA, comfortable in a short-sleeved shirt. Gao, bless him, was the only government official who would talk to me the whole trip - the PRC was still pissed off at the Great Hegemon (as they now call the US) about that incident in the Persian Gulf a few months back when our guys stopped and boarded a Chinese freighter allegedly full of chemical warfare ingredients. They found nothing.

Gao calmly rattled off a fairly staggering list of statistics on how rapidly the phone system there is growing - half to three-quarters of a million lines added per year for the foreseeable future. All of their local exchanges are webbed together with fiber, and they're running fiber down the coast toward Shenzhen. They're setting up packet-switching networks for their customers who want them - banks, import/export houses, and the like.