Kong, stuck in traffic beneath a huge electronic billboard showing animated stock market graphs in white, emerald, and ruby, I gazed into the next lane at a brand-new gray BMW 733i, smooth and polished as a drop of molten glass. Behind the wheel was a Chinese man, affluently fleshy. He'd taken off his suit jacket to expose a striped shirt, French cuffs, the cuff links flashing around the rim of the steering wheel. In the passenger seat to his left sat a beautiful young woman who had flipped her sunvisor down, centering her face in a pool of light from the vanity mirror; as she discussed the day's events with the man, she deftly touched up her Shiseido - not that I would have guessed she was wearing any, and not that she seemed especially vain or preoccupied. The BMW kept pace with my taxi through the tunnel and then the lanes diverged. I couldn't help wondering what the hell was going to happen to this place when it becomes part of the People's Republic in 1997. Needless to say, a lot of Hong Kong residents are wondering the same thing.

The working class there doesn't speak English, but the computer-owning classes do, and the place is heavily networked. Larry Riley and James Campbell, Australian and Sri

Lankan respectively, are the tech reporters for the South China

Morning Post, and they've started a magazine called The

Dataphile, which lists some 700 BBSes in Hong Kong, most reachable via FidoNet - including boards for Communists,

Methodists, Programmers, and Accountants.

Until recently it hasn't been easy for these people to hook into the Internet, but gateways are opening up. Aaron Y. T. Cheung is the executive director of Hong Kong Internet & Gateway

Services Ltd., which has just leased a line between Hong Kong and California. If anyone's going to be the informational mogul of South China, it's probably Cheung. He's a compact, solid, sunny, energetic guy, trained at the University of Minnesota, and jammed with so much information about optical fiber, telecommunications policy, baud rates, Chinese politics, packet data networks, and other arcana that he can hardly get the information out of his mouth fast enough.