ENG-1981 — Page 11

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REVIEW

The 1981 Census confirms the base for that assertion. Hong Kong's labour force participation ratio, at 70.9 per cent of the working age population between 15 and 64 years, is higher than Japan's 68.1 per cent and Singapore's 64.1 per cent - both thriving places that compare with other Asian nations like Pakistan with a ratio of 50.3 per cent. Thus, more men and women in Hong Kong work for their living than anywhere else in Asia - and probably anywhere else on Earth.

Steps in the pressure-cooker integration begin with co-existence between new arrival and entitled belonger, often a relative or friend of the family back home in China. The belonger provides haven, money and the prospect of a job. Tolerance develops at the work bench and within the neighbourhood environment. Complete integration takes years. But, in the end, the new arrival begins to belong when he finds himself cultivating his own human resources like most belongers do.

Social mobility eventually takes over the new belonger. He has proved his ability and has begun to move up the ladder into the bourgeoisie. He has repaid his relative or friend and has become a craftsman, later perhaps a foreman. He has worked and learned, become resourceful, imaginative, self-reliant, go-getting and highly adaptable. Now it is self- betterment, and not survival, that drives him on.

The prototype, go-getter millionaire, who tends increasingly to make himself felt in the corridors of financial power in Hong Kong, is an extension of that same profile. He may challenge the big British-founded conglomerates, known as 'hongs', but he is out of the same simmering, bubbling, boiling Hong Kong social pot. His wealth may make British businessmen look like paupers but seldom nowadays is that wealth inherited. His single- generation success story, in a matter of a decade or so, is tremendously admired and respected.

Neo-heroes

Successful go-getters are heroes and heroes are not asked by Chinese to explain their origins. Instead they inspire emulation. Thus, the Chinese youth comes home from his first working day in life and announces enthusiastically to the family he'll be a millionaire in five years' time. He asks what do they all want - a Rolls Royce, a new house, or what? It follows that Hong Kong's prototype millionaire is expected to wear immaculate pin-stripe blue and ride in a chauffeur-driven limousine. He must have a lavish house and servants and indulge his wife and children.

Material well-being is reward for our neo-hero's success. It is the carrot that keeps all of Hong Kong on the run. One's chances of emulation are evaluated against accounts of how one's neo-hero has retained the common touch, just as teenagers reassure themselves against what they learn of the life-style of their own celebrity psuedo-heroes, film and singing stars. For instance, one hears that the latest neo-hero remains superstituous, takes numerology into account in closing business deals and never fails to consult the before he sites his next building. That, when he's feeling off-colour, he still asks his mother to boil her usual soup, based on old wives' tales. That he'll never change the bank which gave him his first loan.

geomancer

This sort of behaviour breeds a unique homogeneity in Hong Kong. There is little class-consciousness in the social chemistry. Dominant memories of the older generation, passed on to their children, are not of some class struggle akin to the Western industrial revolution. They are of privation and disruption caused by years of civil war, and more recently the Cultural Revolution. Before that, there were memories of generations of village debt to absentee landlords.