COLUMN ONE : Networks of Chinese Rim Pacific : Families and money are flowing into an arc from Canada through the U.S. to Australia, forming an influential force for the next century.

Like thunderbolts out of the South China Sea, the Chinese capitalists who transformed Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore into Southeast Asia’s “Little Dragons” are rattling U.S., Canadian and Australian cities with jolts of investment and immigration.

Even by Pacific Rim standards, the shifts of capital and people are dramatic. In effect, entrepreneurs are forming an ethnic Chinese rim around the Pacific Basin.

“The greatest concentration of entrepreneurial talent the world has ever seen is dispersing throughout the Pacific Basin and establishing the most extraordinary commercial network in history,” said Paul Meo, chief of the World Bank’s international trade division.

The network is remarkable, Meo said, for the resourcefulness and potential of its constituents, who are swarming out--particularly from Taiwan and Hong Kong--to buy real estate and establish businesses with the earnestness of bees from a hive.

In the process, these entrepreneurs are evoking reaction that ranges from delight over their economic stimulus to resentment over what also is perceived as cultural intrusion--a burden the hard-driving overseas Chinese have borne since they began their diaspora 1,000 years ago.

Acquiring capital assets in the New World and transplanting their own people--usually relatives--to tend them, the entrepreneurs are doing much more than expanding their family organizations across the Pacific Ocean from bases in Southeast Asia.

They also are stimulating trans-Pacific expansion among Chinese-owned banks, airlines, shippers, media and other support industries who see profit in following and serving their ethnic entrepreneurial cousins.

In June, Marty Shih, a Monterey Park, Calif., businessman who immigrated from Taiwan 11 years ago, opened a Chinese-language telephone information service--the nation’s first “ethnic” 411-style directory, he says--listing 30,000 Chinese-owned U.S. businesses.

Clearly, a historic milestone is in the making for the 47 million ethnic Chinese who live outside the mainland of China--a population nearly as large as that of France.

Estimates of direct investment in North America and the Southwest Pacific by ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia are guesswork at best--nobody claims to have accurate records--but they may run into tens of billions of dollars a year over the last five to 10 years.

Into Southern California--mainly the Los Angeles area--at least $1.5 billion a year “that we know of” has entered from Taiwan alone since 1985, according to John Ni, a Ministry of Economic Affairs official. “There is much . . . we don’t know of,” Ni said. “Perhaps much, much more.”

Vancouver sellers of hotels, office buildings and other commercial property are said to be getting about half a billion dollars a year from Hong Kong alone. Major sums also are flowing into Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Sydney and Melbourne.

Investment for portfolios is mushrooming, too. In 1984, officially recorded holdings of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore buyers in U.S. stocks, bonds, treasury notes and bank accounts stood at $32.4 billion. By 1988, it had more than doubled to $74.7 billion.

With money and immigration, Chinese entrepreneurs are not only giving shots in the arm to local economies but also projecting a fresh--and sometimes provocative--image of ethnic Chinese as well-heeled, well-educated and very self-confident.

Moreover, interviews with business executives, bankers, economics officials, diplomats and scholars in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Canada and the United States suggest that the diaspora’s momentum will not only continue but accelerate for at least five more years.

And as the Chinese rim develops, some experts say, mainland China’s role as market (population: 1.1 billion) and supplier (mainly of low-cost labor) will grow more important. Eventually, they say, Beijing may emerge as a major player.

“In the longer term, we are talking about a greater Chinese co-prosperity sphere,” said Gary G. Hamilton, a UC Davis sociology professor who is conducting a multinational study of Chinese business practices and organization with scholars at the University of Hong Kong, Tunghai University of Taiwan and the National University of Singapore.

Everyone knows that the Americans and Japanese, with the world’s greatest productive capacities and richest markets, all but own the Pacific Rim. Their gigantic multinational corporations are the region’s economic Goliaths.

But as Hong Kong’s entrepreneurs deploy as “insurance” against Beijing’s 1997 takeover of the British colony, and as investors from Taiwan and Singapore--and from Chinese communities elsewhere in Southeast Asia--follow suit out of profit motive, ethnic Chinese are finding multitudes of niches overlooked by the multinationals.

Capitalistic to the core and independent of Beijing, the investors--even though their commercial arc runs from Canada through the United States to New Zealand and Australia--remain anchored, at least for now, in the so-called “Little Dragons,” an Asian honorific term for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore to mark their economic vitality since the 1960s.

Around this rim, trade, capital and information flow with growing velocity, facilitated by technology revolutions in communications and transportation. Taiwan’s two-way trade has zoomed from $39 billion in 1980 to $118 billion in 1989, Hong Kong’s from $41 billion to $145 billion and Singapore’s from $45 billion to $97 billion.

Altogether, a U.S. government source suggested, the liquid assets owned by the secretive overseas Chinese and privately “sloshing around” the Pacific Basin from account to account and nation to nation could amount to “tens of billions of dollars.”

The exact figures, however, remain uncertain. Even Chinese agree that nobody is more secretive than the Chinese about their finances.

As Jack T. Sun, president and executive director of Taiwan’s Pacific Electric Wire & Cable Co., put it: “Most Chinese trust only their own people and not anybody else.”

The Chinese like to do business their own way, said Michael Hsiao, a pre-eminent sociologist of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica, which explains why 97% of Taiwanese companies have fewer than 30 employees. But the obsession with secretiveness--and the tradition of distrusting outsiders--goes back centuries.

“The cashier and the bookkeeper are always family members,” Hsiao said. “Double bookkeeping is universal.” Obviously, he said, the basic idea is to avoid taxes. But he quoted an ancient saying: “If you have wealth, it is best to keep it secret.”

Whatever the numbers may be, some communities feel engulfed.

In the San Francisco Bay area, for instance, Chinese from Hong Kong and Taiwan own about 10% of downtown San Francisco, about 70 Silicon Valley companies and tracts of land that include 892 acres of a former railroad yard near Brisbane in San Mateo County.

In Vancouver, they have acquired the key 204-acre Expo ’86 site and much other commercial and residential property; in Australia and New Zealand their purchases have triggered real estate inflation and a popular demand--directed as well against Japanese, who also are investing heavily--to curtail Asian immigration. (In the last two years, Chinese from Hong Kong and Taiwan accounted for 70% of New Zealand’s 7,534 “business immigrants.”)

With Chinese, office buildings and hotels are a favorite investment. Tuntex, a major Taiwan textile, construction and real estate conglomerate, for instance, has bought Universal City’s Registry Hotel and will open it as the Sierra Hotel next month; last year, Hong Kong’s New World Hotels bought the 825 Ramada hotels for $540 million.

The Chinese impact pervades Southern California. Monterey Park has emerged as the Western world’s first Chinese suburban city. Other Southland communities also feel a growing Chinese presence--about 46% of the 2,699 schoolchildren in elite, pricey San Marino, for instance, are Asian, of which a plurality (38%) is Chinese. South Pasadena’s public library now has 400 books in Chinese.

Prompting this broad movement of people and funds are three historic turns of the Asian wheel:

* First, Beijing’s scheduled takeover of Hong Kong from Britain in 1997. “Anyone with a grain of sense is finding a way out,” said a Western banker who asked not to be identified. In the last three years, more than 150,000 professionals and skilled residents have departed either to reside in the United States, Canada or Australia, or to establish safe havens there.

“What (capital) you see going out now is only a trickle,” said David K. P. Li, chief executive of Hong Kong’s Bank of East Asia, the largest privately owned Chinese bank. “It may seem to be a large volume, but seven years remain and people still see opportunity here (to make a profit). But, inevitably, the flood will come.”

* Second, Taiwan’s astounding economic success. After Japan, this island nation of 20 million--so undeveloped at mid-century it couldn’t shoe itself or make rifles--possesses the world’s second-highest foreign exchange reserves (after Japan’s)--about $69 billion--and makes computers.

Today, Taiwan is rich to the point of awkwardness, and its government actually pushes people to invest abroad. Individuals may send $5 million a year out of the country, no questions asked--the hope being to reduce the foreign exchange reserves that so stunningly symbolize Taiwan’s trade success and thus ease U.S. pressure on Taipei in trade talks. Last year, more than $5 billion was recorded as going out--mostly to the United States and Southeast Asian nations. In just the last six months, reserves have dropped by $4 billion.

* Third, the growth of pools of private wealth in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Virtually all of this wealth, which is believed to have swollen to Gargantuan size over the last five or 10 years, is said to belong to ethnic Chinese who dominate these rapidly developing economies. Economic overlords of their adopted societies, the overseas Chinese are following their Hong Kong and Taiwan cousins into the Pacific Rim action.

“Look at history and you will see the logic of today’s moves (to other Pacific Basin locales),” said Ng Kee Choe, executive vice president of the Singapore Development Bank. “The process began centuries ago when our ancestors left China to eke out a living in neighboring lands and got this far. Now it is time to move on.”

The old magic transplants, too. In the United States and Canada, Chinese are not only buying real estate--they are famous for their passion for acquiring property--but making garments, personal computers, other electronic products, toys, simple tools and furniture.

They also are implanting their own infrastructure. Besides banking, insurance and media, they are establishing Chinese medical, legal and even architectural services--and countless restaurants and food stores.

“They are trying to replicate Hong Kong in Vancouver,” a British Columbia official said.

That is a logical conclusion to draw, according to Hamilton, the UC Davis professor. “For business, they do abroad what they learned to do at home, and for comfort they try to re-create the cultural environment in which they feel at ease,” he said.

“That means more Chinese newspapers, more Chinese characters on more public signs, more Chinese restaurants and--just plain period--more Chinese. The overseas Chinese presence is going to become very large in the Pacific Rim, and we might as well get used to it.”

Unlike the 19th-Century Chinese who came to toil on the railroad and in the gold fields, and then formed the core of today’s Chinatowns, the current wave of newcomers contains yuppies and transoceanic commuters and shakers.

Not every Chinese-speaking immigrant, of course, is a tycoon or a straight-A student or even a straight arrow. Nor is the end always a happy one. In sedate San Marino’s first murder in 11 years, an immigrant businessman from Taiwan was gunned down in front of his home in June.

But many new arrivals are well-to-do, made even more so by the Taiwan dollar’s revaluation against the U.S. dollar by 40% over the last five years. And they tend to travel a lot.

In each of the last four years, trans-Pacific air passenger traffic has risen 20% to 30%, an increase for which “spacemen”--a Hong Kong nickname for businessmen who commute by air back and forth across the Pacific Ocean--are largely responsible.

Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific, which has a new North American headquarters in Vancouver, has just inaugurated direct Hong Kong-Los Angeles flights. Taiwan’s China Air is starting direct Taipei-Los Angeles service. A new private airline in Taiwan, Evergreen, is opening service to North America, and subsidiaries of Qantas and China Air are planning the first direct Taiwan-Australia service.

“Obviously, these are not Chinatown Chinese,” said Liu Tai-ying, president of Taiwan’s Institute of Economic Research and a Ph.D. from Cornell. “These recent Chinese who have gone to North America and elsewhere in the Pacific Rim have education, professions, suburban homes, property investments, and they speak--at least the ones from Taiwan--Mandarin.”

Far from fitting outdated stereotypes, the new immigrants tend to enter society at the higher reaches of the demographic scale. Whereas nearly all “old” Chinese-Americans descend from workers who emigrated from the South China province of Guangdong (and 60% of them came from a single county, Taishan), Liu said, “many of the recent immigrants went abroad from diverse origins as students and then stayed, and many went as rich businessmen.”

“They begin with an international outlook. They may have relatives in several countries, and they stay in touch. The family is paramount.”

Such family connections are the Chinese rim’s building blocks. Rather than a seamless network with a headquarters and central control, the rim is an amorphous combination of separate family networks linked to each other through common culture, language and ancestry.

“It is,” said Hamilton of UC Davis, “a network of networks.”

Often a family has members in three or more nations. “Remember, every Chinese has a cousin 3,000 miles away,” joked John Chan, Hong Kong’s secretary for trade and industry.

For Victor Chung, 35, U.S. citizen and Orange County resident, 10 trips across the Pacific in a year is nothing extraordinary. He confers in Thailand with his grandfather, K. S. Chung, who directs the family network from Bangkok. Victor Chung also visits family operations in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and Vancouver.

The Chungs own 30 small companies that engage in computer assembly, garment manufacturing, import-export trading, raising tobacco and other farm products, and electronics-component manufacturing in China. A former Red Guard who fled from China to Hong Kong, Victor Chung graduated from UC Berkeley and manages a firm that assembles components made in the United States and China, Universal Digital Computer Corp. of La Mirada.

Victor isn’t the family’s only cosmopolite. Over an entrepreneurial life divided among Canton, Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangkok, his grandfather had six sons and seven daughters who have produced a third generation that spans the Pacific Ocean.

Chung companies’ sales total about $100 million a year, but Victor holds a grander vision, with China in a much expanded role.

“With (cheaper) labor costs, China will become more important to our business--and we expect it to improve as a market,” he said.

A patriarch who travels is Li Ka-shing, a trend-setting Hong Kong billionaire who in 1988 bought (for $260 million) the rights to develop the 204-acre site of Vancouver’s Expo ’86 into a global financial center and thus triggered a flood of Hong Kong investment and immigration.

With a 27-year-old son, Victor, a Stanford graduate who has taken Canadian citizenship, in residence, the father pays visits to Vancouver to observe his Concord Pacific Development Co. as it proceeds with plans for a 400-room hotel, 10,000 housing units and a 630-berth marina.

While there, Li Ka-shing--who is deputy chairman of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corp., an owner of the Bank of British Columbia--also checks on his own Husky Oil Ltd., Canada’s 12th-biggest oil company.

But the elder Li expects to continue to operate from Hong Kong after Beijing takes control in seven years. While investing abroad, confidants say, he has not diminished his holdings in Hong Kong--which represent about 20% of the capitalization on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Nevertheless, Li has helped to make Canada hot. According to Vancouver Mayor Gordon Campbell, Li has “a profound commitment to Vancouver, and others decided to follow.” Over the last four years, close to $3 billion in direct investment and about 25,000 immigrants have moved directly from Hong Kong to Vancouver.

Even Allen Lee, a strongly U.S.-oriented maker of printed circuit boards who sells exclusively to IBM and other American customers, owns a Vancouver condominium that he visits on some of his four or more annual trips across the Pacific Ocean.

A graduate of Michigan (class of ‘64), Lee follows Big 10 football and attends the Rose Bowl when his alma mater plays. But his heart is in Hong Kong, where he serves on both the influential Legislative Council and the Executive Council--and where he intends to stay.

“I could live in the United States,” Lee said; in fact, he maintains an office in Los Angeles. He also could live in Canada, Australia and probably Britain.

“But I haven’t even obtained another passport,” Lee said. “I think Hong Kong will be viable.”

Then why the condominium in Vancouver?

“An investment,” Lee said. He bought it from Li Ka-shing.

Even as the Pacific Rim prospers, many businessmen look beyond to Europe. Kenneth C. M. Lo, the president of Taiwan’s China Trust Co. with assets of $4 billion, is weighing possible branch sites in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Brussels for his bank and leasing company before 1992.

“Our objective is to maintain a presence wherever Chinese businessmen go,” Lo said. He has offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, and he expects a demand for his services in Europe in the 1990s.

The overseas Chinese story combines towering success and heart-breaking tragedy.

Almost everywhere on their “sojourn”--as legend calls it--from the homeland, the Chinese have triumphed in economic competition. Long ago they came to dominate Southeast Asia’s economies, even in Indonesia and Malaysia, where anti-Chinese discrimination is public policy.

Some of the world’s great fortunes belong to Chinese families, including those of Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing and shipowner Y. K. Pao (who bought the U.S. Omni Hotel chain for $135 million two years ago); Taiwan’s textile magnate Y. Z. Hsu; petrochemical king Y. C. Wang (his Formosa Plastics Group sales for 1988: $5.8 billion); financier-industrialist Koo Chen-fu; shipping kingpin Chang Yung-fa, and Singapore’s banker and rubber plantation owner Lee Seng Wee and developer Kwek Hong Png.

But as Chinese outside the mainland have demonstrated the power of discipline, hard work and family cohesion, they also have been made to suffer some of the world’s most brutal discrimination, including a 1965 blood bath in Indonesia that took an estimated 400,000 lives.

“We call ourselves the Jews of Asia,” said a prominent Malaysian of Chinese descent who, fearful of reprisals against his family, granted an interview on the subject of anti-Chinese discrimination on the explicit condition that his name not be used.

“By law, our companies have Malayan people in ostensible positions of authority, but often it is a sham,” he said. “They are figureheads, and Chinese still run things.”

So what good does the law requiring a degree of Malaysian ownership do? “It may calm feelings,” the Malaysian Chinese said. In 1969, at least 100 Chinese were killed and hundreds more injured in race rioting in Kuala Lumpur.

In North America, from San Marino to Vancouver, racial heat also rises--though without massive bloodshed. Chinese often get blamed for inflated real estate prices even though Japanese and other newcomers, including Americans on the move, also contribute.

Beyond that, Chinese notions of architecture and landscaping have inflamed settled residents in British Columbia and in California. In both areas, immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan have erected oversize homes and destroyed trees to build privacy walls.

In many communities, Chinese have their greatest impact in schools, where many Chinese children tend to excel, elevate school performance standards beyond past norms and take many academic honors.

Nearly everywhere, the Chinese provide immediate economic stimulus--and sometimes it is spectacular. Because of Li Ka-shing and his fellow investors, for instance, Vancouver is changing from a relatively sleepy port city into a strategic Pacific Rim center.

It therefore is small wonder that Canada has eased immigration rules for those with a $500,000 net worth and capital to invest. In Hong Kong, many meet the requirement: Half of the colony’s emigrants go to Canada.

With a similar plan, Australia ranks second in immigration after Canada. Either the United States or Britain would outrank Canada, observers say, but London bans landed immigrants from Hong Kong, and the United States restricts their number--even though Congress is weighing legislation to raise Hong Kong’s quota from 5,000 a year to either 20,000 or 50,000.

Still, resentment is palpable. Arcadia, Monterey Park, Rosemead, San Gabriel, San Marino and Alhambra have passed ordinances prohibiting monolingual signs in Chinese.

San Marino has outlawed destruction of some kinds of trees without a permit, and a design committee closely scrutinizes plans for exterior remodeling of homes.

“It’s all to keep the Chinese from overpowering San Marino and to preserve as much as we can of traditional feeling,” an elected San Marino official said in private comments.

In Canada, the cultural clash deeply distresses British Columbia’s lieutenant governor, David Lam, a 66-year-old philanthropist who immigrated from Hong Kong 24 years ago and serves as Queen Elizabeth II’s chief representative in the province after a successful business career.

“It is too easy to call it racist,” Lam said. “In my mind, it is not racist. It is a result of sensational reporting and an uneasiness when different cultures meet and are at play. Together they have led to a battleground mentality--an en garde stance, so to speak.”

Lam has counsel for both sides. To Canadians he says: “The Chinese are bringing a billion dollars worth of know-how and entrepreneurial spirit to this country in addition to lots of capital, and Canadians should be more patient and tolerant and look to the future.”

Upon the Chinese, Lam urges both sensitivity to Canadian concerns for the environment--particularly when the Chinese landscape their properties and remodel their homes--and participation in the Western America traditions of sharing with strangers and volunteering.

“Specifically, I urge them to join groups such as Meals on Wheels, to donate to cultural and educational institutions and to cross those ethnic barriers.”

Because of the differences among the Chinese themselves--in Taiwan and Singapore, many tend to view the people of Hong Kong as hucksters, and in Hong Kong, some tend to view their offshore cousins as bumpkins--are they in fact a cohesive group? The answer is no.

But they share a common culture and an entrepreneurial genius that has made the Chinese economic legends in Southeast Asia, and many Chinese concede they probably share a preference for working with each other rather than with non-Chinese strangers.

In Los Angeles, where Taiwanese outnumber immigrants from Hong Kong or Singapore, Councilman Michael Woo rates the people from Hong Kong as generally more Westernized, more proficient in English and more sophisticated than the ones from Taiwan.

Basically, he says, the comparison reflects the environment in which they were reared and in which they lived before immigrating to the United States.

“But we are seeing an increasing level of interaction between the Hong Kong (immigrants) and the Taiwanese here,” Woo said. “The business people are guided more by pragmatism than cultural differences, which they learn to overcome. In the 1990s we will see more cohesion.”

Times researcher Nina Green contributed to this article. CHINESE POPULATION OUTSIDE MAINLAND CHINA Residents of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are spreading to nations around the Pacific Rim. Hong Kong: 5.6 million Thailand: 6 million Malaysia: 4.2 million Singapore: 1.9 million Indonesia: 4.1 million Taiwan: 20 million Philippines: 0.7 million Australia: 0.3 million Canada: 0.5 million Elsewhere: 2.3 million United States: 1.3 million 1980: 812,178 1990: 1,259,038* 2000: 1,683,537** *Estimated **Projected Total Chinese population outside mainland China: 46.9 million Source: Government sources, Population Reference Bureau CHINESE IMMIGRANTS TO THE U.S. The number of immigration visas issued by the U.S. to Chinese immigrants from three areas: Source: Immigration and Naturalization Service