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talking into the telephone, leaving the general to stew. Tang felt out of place in this huge, opulent office decorated with tropical hardwoods and designer furniture, four stories high in a grand temple dedicated to the gods of money.
    Tang Ming was a peasant's son, born during World War II, whose earliest memories were of his family fleeing before advancing Japanese troops.
    He had spent his adult life in the army. From skin to backbone he was a soldier. A firm believer in the social goals of communism, he was, like a majority of his fellow countrymen, a cultural and racial xenophobe. Before his assign-
    ment to Hong Kong he had actually seen foreigners on only two occasions in his life, both official visits to Beijing. He had seen the foreigners at a distance, not talked with them. Sitting in this huge office and watching an impeccably attired senior Japanese executive babble in a foreign tongue about matters he didn't understand made General Tang Ming restless and irritable.
    Someone with a cellular telephone called the editor of the China Post, Hong Kong's leading English-language newspaper, and informed him about the restless crowd in front of the Bank of the Orient. The editor, Rip Buckingham, had heard rumors for the past two days about the possible collapse of the bank, so as he listened to the caller describe the crowd and the troops, his gut told him, This is it.
    Rip called the newsroom and ordered four reporters and two photographers dispatched to the scene immediately. Then he extracted an eyewitness account from the caller while he jotted notes.
    When he finally let the caller go, Rip automatically glance*d out the window of his corner office at the giant Coca-Cola sign on top of the Bank of the Orient building, an imposing seventy-story skyscraper in Hong Kong's Central District. In a typical Hong Kong deal, the developer of the building played off competing consumer giants, one against the other, for the honor of having their logo prominently displayed on the masthead of the new bank building, the biggest one in the colony. Reportedly the local Coke bottler had paid a fee in excess of ten million dollars U.S. to the developer just for the privilege of putting a sign up there. That was in 1995, two years before the British turned over the colony to the Chinese Communists.
    No one is building buildings like that in Hong Kong now, Rip thought bitterly.
    Rip was an Australian who had enjoyed a wonderful, vagrant youth. He repaired slot machines in Las Vegas, worked as a motorman on San Francisco trolleys, sailed the Pacific and Indian oceans in the forecastles of rusty Liberian tramps,
    and bicycled across most of China, including the entire route of the ancient Silk Road, from Tyre on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean to Sian in central China. Finally, in his late twenties, Rip Buckingham came to rest in Hong Kong, where he got a haircut and traded his sandals for leather shoes. He even married a local girl.
    Rip turned to the computer sitting on a stand beside his desk and began writing. He wanted to get the eyewitness account down while it was fresh and immediate. He was still working on it when his reporters began calling in on their cellular telephones. He folded the facts they had gleaned into the story he was writing and asked questions.
    Unlike a reporter operating in a Western nation, Rip did not telephone the governor's officer or the police or the PLA to elicit comments or give those officials a chance to dispute the accounts his reporters were getting. He had done that years ago when he first took over the managing editor's position, and before long was told by some government functionary, "You can't print that." The police then came to the newspaper office to ensure that he didn't.
    So far he had managed to avoid the wrath of the Communist officials who ruled Hong Kong. It hadn't been easy. He was, he often thought wryly, becoming a master at damning with faint praise. I'm the king of innuendo, he