‘We All Mingle Between West and East’

HONG KONG — As the sun rose over Hong Kong Park, a verdant oasis tucked amid this city’s mirrored skyscrapers, tai chi master Ha Kwok-cheung fended off an invisible enemy. His stance melted from “Striking the Tiger” to “Hands of the Cloud,” and the motions looked less like an exercise in self-defense than a ghostly dance.

The essence of this practice, he says, is to learn to absorb an adversary’s energy and redirect it to your advantage. “It’s about being hard while being soft, about finding a balance and creating energy from within,” Ha said.

From this spot halfway up Victoria Peak, he has greeted thousands of sunrises and witnessed Hong Kong’s alchemy. He has seen his city absorb waves of Chinese refugees and put their energies to work. He has watched the skyline soar as commerce here shifted from shipping to factories to skyscrapers. He has observed Communist Red Guards wave Mao’s little red books and Hong Kong capitalists respond with quiet fists full of cash.

Like this tai chi master, Hong Kong itself--which relies on the energy of its people and its ability to shadowbox, adapt and deflect--has not just survived but thrived.

Indeed, on this morning, as the daylight illuminated Hong Kong’s harbor, the screech of cockatoos in the park broke the low drone of traffic and blaring ship horns. The fishmongers had already sorted their morning catch, and futures traders had made or lost a million dollars. Old men strolled with their caged songbirds, sailor-suited children frolicked from their buses, and white-shirted clerks with beepers on their belts slurped their congee (rice gruel) before work.

This is the Hong Kong that China will take over July 1, a prodigal enclave awaiting a celebrated return. After the sun sets on this corner of the British Empire on June 30, it will rise again on Hong Kong, and like millions of others continuing their daily routines, Ha will be here. “Everything will change,” he said, smiling. “And nothing will change.”

Like nearly half of the 6.3 million people who live in Hong Kong, Ha is a refugee from China. He came along with about 1 million others in 1949, fleeing the Communist army. More people arrived after China’s famines in the 1950s and the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in the ‘60s.

Ha left his mother and sisters behind and with his father worked his way up from poverty as a kung fu master and herbalist. But then, he shrugged, everyone here has a tale to tell: Kung fu movie star Jackie Chan was nearly sold by his father; billionaire Li Ka-shing was an orphan who got his start selling plastic flowers; newspaper tycoon Jimmy Lai swam to Hong Kong from Guangdong province.

“Life used to be very difficult, so we worked hard and it got easier,” Ha said. “But we still work hard.”

Ha, 69, owns his own Chinese medicine shop, teaches kung fu and tai chi, and heads a school that teaches the traditional lion dance. His card says he belongs to 15 professional herbalist and sports organizations.

It is energy like Ha’s that makes Hong Kong hum. It is palpable to visitors the moment they arrive: Locals hustle to the customs line at the airport as if they will be shut out of the city gates. Businesspeople punch elevator buttons as if that could save them a precious few seconds. Cellular telephones are ubiquitous here, allowing for deal-making on the run. The world’s longest outdoor escalator whisks commuters up and down Hong Kong’s steep-sloped peak; the only ones who stand still during its trips, though, are tourists.

This obstinate drive is what has made tiny Hong Kong a global trade center, a territory roughly half the size of Orange County that is the world’s seventh-largest trading economy. The gross domestic product here--nearly $25,000 per capita--exceeds that of Britain and is 10 times higher than the most generous estimate of China’s.

But for all its sparkling attributes, Hong Kong is for many a rootless place. It is a second home or a way station; 500,000 people here hold passports of other countries. Only now, as the moment nears when Hong Kong will return to the land that millions of its citizens once fled, are there as many people who were born on this soil as there are people who sought refuge on it.

“Hong Kong will be part of China, but we all mingle between the West and East,” said Housing Authority Chairwoman Rosanna Wong, who was born here and educated, in part, overseas.

The combination can be seen in people’s names: a Western-style first name (Rosanna) attached to the Chinese family name (Wong), then the Chinese name (Yick-ming).

Some monikers were bestowed by British teachers or English tutors; others are self-chosen, resulting in delicious juxtapositions like politician Mozart Hui, travel agent Shadow Mak, waitresses named Cinderella or Ice, or a college student named Hitler Yang who changed his name to Winston at the end of his history course on World War II.

This ability to straddle East and West and come up with something unexpected is Hong Kong’s hallmark. Its success lies in its combination of Chinese family networks and dynamism underpinned by British bureaucracy and rule of law. But the mix, at times, also has been a source of confusion.

“When we fill in a form,” Wong said, “we don’t know which box to tick. Are we Chinese, are we British subjects or what?”

The return to China is in part a relief, because it provides an answer. “We are Chinese,” Tung Chee-hwa, chief executive of the incoming Beijing-appointed legislature, reminds his audience in nearly every speech. “We are proud to be Chinese. It is time to be the masters of our own house.”

But for others the reversion only raises more questions. “I am happy to be Chinese. But I am not happy with the Chinese government in Beijing,” said artist Albert Zhang, whose attitude was transformed by the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. “All the students were asking for was to be more like Hong Kong, to have a clean government and democracy. And they were killed. How should we feel about the future?”

This ambivalence about Hong Kong’s once and future sovereign is at the core of the territory’s unease over the transition and its own cultural identity.

A survey by Baptist University’s Transition Project found that nearly two-thirds call themselves “Hong Kongers” or “Hong Kong Chinese.” Only a third consider themselves simply “Chinese.” But that proportion grows as the hand-over nears.

Despite the differences, as part of China, Hong Kong will have a special role to play. “We have a mission to bring China into the 21st century,” said industrialist Raymond Chien Kuo-fung, who will serve in Tung’s Cabinet. “We never had this sense of mission toward the British.”

Already, business leaders say, the takeover is underway. And it’s not China taking over Hong Kong but the other way around. Hong Kong has moved its money and jobs across the border, where labor is cheaper and, at double-digit growth, investments are more rewarding.

This tiny territory is the source of 60% of China’s foreign investment and employs 5 million people on the mainland--more than the total number of workers in Hong Kong. A few Hong Kong legislators have even floated a plan to use some of its $42 billion in reserves to buy part of the neighboring province to make room for the expanding population. China, in turn, is one of Hong Kong’s leading investors.

Larry Yung Chi-kin, chairman of one of China’s largest investment conglomerates in Hong Kong, CITIC Pacific, is an individual who would be most able to use methods not uncommon among the mainland’s budding capitalists to get ahead--connections, coercion, bribes.

He is, after all, the son of China’s vice president, Rong Yiren, who is also the former head of CITIC Pacific’s parent company, China International Trade and Investment Corp.

But Yung, a Stanford-educated engineer, has proved to be one of the staunchest defenders of the Hong Kong system and has profited gloriously by playing by the rules.

He and others argue that economic integration is the greatest reassurance to Hong Kong’s people that China’s promise of “one country, two systems” will be kept.

The irony is that the two systems that were meant to be kept separate were economic. Now China’s version of communism and Hong Kong’s capitalism look more and more alike, while the real split remains in politics: Will Hong Kong’s embrace of democracy make China’s people demand it too?

Even families are divided by political beliefs. Democracy activist Szeto Wah and his brother Szeto Keung, who recently retired from China’s high commission in Hong Kong, used to see each other only when Wah led protests outside of Keung’s office. Now they occasionally come together through their families and their asserted love for China.

“We just show our patriotism in different ways,” Szeto Wah, who is considered a subversive by Beijing, said, laughing. “I love my country, so I’m trying to help it change.”

Martin Lee, a lawyer and the leader of the Democratic Party, differs sharply with his sister-in-law, Nellie Fong, an accountant who is close to Beijing’s leaders. They both have logged hours overseas spreading opposite messages about Hong Kong’s future.

“Beijing has already broken many of its promises to us here,” Lee said, as he prepared to challenge in court China’s replacement of the elected legislature with an appointed body. “We must be realistic about what the future holds.”

As pragmatic as Hong Kongers are, they also exhibit faith and hope. This is, after all, the place where the incoming chief executive refuses to move into his new home or office without consulting a geomancer to ensure the proper harmony with natural forces. This is the 21st century metropolis where, just a few years ago, 2,000 people thronged a fishing village in Aberdeen when a fisherman radioed that he had caught a mermaid in his net.

At the end of the day, the Hong Kong people who have remained here cling to the hope that Beijing will not want to harm this special administrative region and its riches.

“If, as a Chinese person, you don’t believe in Hong Kong and think you need to bring in outside forces to protect you, you have no future,” Nellie Fong said. “We’ve got to be the ones to help ourselves.”

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The Basics

* Population: 6.3 million (98% Chinese)

* Land area: 423 square miles (Hong Kong and other islands, Kowloon Peninsula, New Territories)

* Capital: Victoria (commonly called Hong Kong)

* Average life expectancy: 79 years

* Average annual rainfall: 85.1 inches

* Industries: Shipping, banking, manufacturing, tourism, motion picture production, insurance, publishing

* Agriculture: Vegetable farming, fishing

* Per capita gross domestic product (in U.S. dollars): $24,600

Sources: Hong Kong Government Information Office, The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1997, Columbia Encyclopedia, Political Handbook of the World 1997, Times staff reports