HONG KONG -- Zhang Yibing wears designer labels, dines in classy restaurants and goes home to an apartment with a golden sunset view. Anything a hot-shot 30-year-old investment banker could reasonably desire, he has. [This would make birth year approx 1966.] Well, almost anything. "I have very few Hong Kong friends,'' says the Beijing native, who moved here three years ago.

Emily Shing, fashionably dressed in a sleek black outfit, has no regrets about leaving Hangzhou, the scenic silk capital of China. But in Hong Kong, her adopted home, she is hit every so often by a hollow feeling. "I have friends, and we talk, but we never say what's in our hearts,'' she says over a quick dinner before dashing back to her marketing project.

Both graduates of the prestigious Beijing Foreign Studies University, Mr. Zhang and Miss Shing belong to a legion of bright young Chinese who come to seek their fortunes in Hong Kong. In this British-run financial center, they discover career opportunities galore, but also a jarring reality: Living in the midst of the ethnic Chinese of Hong Kong, they are social outsiders as much as any foreigner.

Communication at work, mainly through English, isn't a problem. Outside the office, the speakers of Mandarin, China's official tongue, live apart from Hong Kong's Cantonese-speaking majority. The two groups' perceptions of each other are laden with stereotypical images -- backward and corrupt China compared with shallow, money-obsessed Hong Kong.

It is a shifting balance, with plenty of underlying tension, as China's July 1 takeover of Hong Kong looms. Dispersed among companies of many different national stripes, Chinese professionals and executives form an invaluable pool of China expertise. As they rise through the ranks, they are likely to become a major force in the corporate world, with profound impact on the way business is done in Hong Kong.

"The Chinese tend to be more aggressive than their Hong Kong counterparts, which isn't necessarily a bad thing,'' says Tsang Shu-ki, an academic with the Business Research Center of Hong Kong Baptist University. "They're highly motivated, put in longer hours and tend to take chances more readily when confronted with regulatory gray areas.''

Some of these Chinese executives and professionals come directly from China. Others end up in Hong Kong after stints as students or immigrants in third countries, such as the U.S. or Canada. There aren't any statistics on how many of them are in Hong Kong. But their presence, which Mr. Tsang calls "an emerging trend,'' is evident throughout the business community.

The apartment of Mr. Zhang, the investment banker, is a veritable boarding house. Some half-dozen former Beijing schoolmates job hunting in Hong Kong have stayed with him during the past year or two. Some employers of these Beijing Foreign Studies University alumni: Hong Kong-based investment bank Jardine Fleming Group; telecommunications giant France Telecom; the South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper; the American consulate. The list goes on.

Once called the Beijing Foreign Language Institute, the university used to be attached to China's Foreign Ministry. A shake-up in the system in recent years has placed it under the oversight of the education authorities. But the university has continued to be an important training ground for aspiring diplomats, airline pilots and intelligence officers.

Mr. Zhang, son of a nuclear physicist, had aspired to be an officer in the People's Liberation Army. Poor eyesight put that goal out of reach. After graduating in 1987, he worked in the Beijing and Sydney offices of Bank of China, the country's foreign-exchange bank. China Everbright Holdings Co., a diversified state-owned concern, recruited him in 1993 with a mandate to create a financial unit in Hong Kong.

Now that Everbright Finance & Investment Co. is securely established, Mr. Zhang, one of its directors, sounds as self-assured as any highflying deal-maker. He visits Beijing every chance he gets, missing what he terms the intellectual life there. Yet he also loves his life in Hong Kong -- his work, his squash games and spacious apartment. Divorced, with no children, he lives the happy life of a Hong Kong yuppie.

"I think I've done well by Hong Kong standards,'' he says between mobile-phone conversations and coffee in the lobby of a luxury hotel. But he hasn't forgotten the struggle he faced when he, along with several Chinese colleagues, went about setting up the new company.

In financial circles, hardly anyone can afford to slight the powerful Bank of China. But Everbright's start-up unit was a different matter. Mr. Zhang says he got the cold shoulder when he went around Hong Kong's financial community seeking advice and credit lines. He recalls being snubbed by some industry peers he had known from his Bank of China days.

"Some of them wanted only to know how much business I could give them right away. When they didn't hear what they wanted to hear, their reaction was like: 'Don't call us, and we won't call you either,' '' he says.

Blame it on cold-blooded capitalism, or blame it on unrealistic expectations. In either case, feeling let down by friends is a recurring theme in the Hong Kong experience of many Chinese newcomers.

In China, where rules are murky or nonexistent, and the bureaucracy is all-powerful, the trading of favors is needed to carry out the simplest transactions, whether it is replacing a lost identity card or applying for bank credit. Little gets done without it. That makes it ungracious -- and impolitic -- to refuse a request for help from friends or relatives. Everyone knows he will need a favor himself some time.

Hong Kong, by comparison, tends to emphasize rules over relationships. Networking, while useful, has its limits, and favors don't come as easily. In many Chinese eyes, it is an amazingly efficient society, yet impersonal and highly result-oriented. All this leaves Yang Qing deeply torn between the two systems.

"For a country or a government, it's probably better to have everything legal and clear. For individuals, for myself, I don't know. Sometimes I feel more comfortable doing things the Chinese way,'' says the investment banker, an easy-going 29-year-old hanging out in a British-style pub.

That isn't to say he doesn't like Hong Kong. A classmate of Mr. Zhang's, Mr. Yang left his native Beijing in 1989 to go to the U.S. There, he worked in the credit-card division of First National Bank of Chicago after earning his master's degree in business administration. In January [of this year, 1996] he came to Hong Kong to join a British investment bank, happy to be in Asia and impressed by the order that existed in the territory amid the noise and the crowds.

He had expected to find chaos, as in Shanghai and Beijing, and streets overrun by gangsters, as suggested by the movies. What he actually found were clean shopping malls, disciplined policemen and clockwork-like traffic management.

"Whoever created this city, British or Chinese, has done a beautiful job. It makes me proud to think this will be part of China,'' Mr. Yang says.

But it isn't home. "It's a very commercial place. People always talk about other people in terms of what work they do and how much money they make.'' He admits, though, that money is one reason he is staying, at least for the time being. "If I could make as much money there, I think I would prefer Beijing to Hong Kong,'' Mr. Yang says.

Is the money culture such a bad thing?

After finishing university in 1989, Miss Shing went to work for a large state-owned company, China National Machinery & Equipment Export & Import Corp. The pay wasn't much. But the job was secure. In China, that would be reason enough for many people to stay on for life. But through family connections in Hong Kong, she made her way here as an immigrant in 1991.

In Hong Kong, she was overwhelmed. Her parents, a university professor and a schoolteacher, never talked much about money. Although she had heard about people getting rich in China, she says she had never seen it with her own eyes. But in Hong Kong, wealth was in plain sight -- the fancy cars, the glittering shop windows and luxury homes. "It's a chance for me to see how far behind China is,'' Miss Shing says.

She knocked on many doors looking for work, but never found anything better than secretarial jobs. That only made her more determined to improve her lot. Using her own savings, she left for Paris last year to study for a business degree. Her effort already has helped open doors. In Hong Kong this summer for her vacation, she was given a temporary marketing research assignment by France Telecom, where she once worked as a secretary.

Miss Shing, who is 28, says one of her goals in life is to have "a good family and husband -- someone who is intellectual.'' But nothing would equal the importance of a professional career that pays good money, whether in Hong Kong or elsewhere. "It's a good thing to be sensitive to money. For a woman, it's bad if you learn too late the importance of money and independence,'' she says.

Most of our impressions of the entertainment industry are negative, because the speed of the entertainment industry is very fast, usually because we have not had time to digest this melon, the next melon will follow. , And for the stars of the entertainment industry, marriage and divorce is also a fleeting feeling, but the life of celebrity couples who get together and leave more, coupled with the hardship of raising children and the disturbance of household chores, makes the gap between celebrity couples gradually arise. In addition to feelings, celebrities’ marriage and love may also involve financial issues, so some celebrities are not decent to break up.

Celebrities have the same emotions and desires as ordinary people. Yang Lan has experienced two marriages, and Yang Lan’s ex-husband Zhang Yibing was her father As a graduate student, Zhang Yibing worked in a bank. At that time, the two of them had a small house in Beijing, which seemed to be rented. Then they went to the United States together. After arriving in the U.S., Yang Lan, like other international students, yearned for love. However, after spending a long time with Zhang Yibing, it was inevitable to lose the taste of love. This is how she felt that her previous marriage was a mistake after getting to know Wu Zheng. And frankly said that when I married my ex-husband, I was young and ignorant!

Perhaps because of the high popularity, Yang Lan's personal life has also become the focus of attention from the outside world. Many people know that Yang Lan and the current husband have experienced a marriage before being together, although now Yang Lan and Wu Zheng appeared as a couple, but few people knew the love story between him and Zhang Yibing. Compared with that, Yang Lan felt that the marriage with Zhang Yibing was still extremely immature and therefore inappropriate, but she could only complain. Being young and ignorant, Yang Lan divorced Zhang Yibing soon. Together with Wu Zheng, he and his wife founded Sunshine Culture.

Yang Lan and her first husband Zhang Yibing came from the same school, and the reason for Yang Lan and Zhang Yibing’s bond is that Yang Lan’s father took Zhang Yibing to study for a while, and Yang Lan seems to be from heaven. Like my darling, he has been so smooth in his career, and he has hardly encountered any setbacks.In terms of career, Yang Lan was indeed very successful, but emotionally, Yang Lan’s two marriages made him feel that the first paragraph was a mistake. For love, shoes are not suitable. Only his feet know. What about you? Look?