POWER ON THE PACIFIC RIM : Culture : How to Make It Big in Business: Coastal Chinese Point the Way : From Shanghai to Taipei, entrepreneurs are reasserting their people’s ancient savvy.

Rock music blaring from the F-ONE clothing store gave the balmy evening a festive air, but the man out front on a low red stool was working hard.

Standing on his precarious perch, the barker gestured at swarms of passing shoppers, alternately shouting, blasting on a silver whistle and gyrating in dance to the beat of “Surfin’ USA.” He seemed almost to be enjoying himself. But it looked like a tough job, and probably one that didn’t pay very well. A college student with a part-time job? He seemed a bit too old for that.

“You here every night?” a passerby asked.

“No, not always,” the man replied. “I’m the owner.”

Tseng Chin-feng, 35, the gyrating storekeeper, also owns a factory that makes most of the jackets and trousers he sells. If he wanted to, he said, he could “just sit inside and manage things and keep the accounts.”

“But I think I should get out here and work hard,” he said. “Then my employees try harder too.”

Tseng’s hustle hints at the human factors that have made Taiwan an economic powerhouse. The same raw energy can be found in Hong Kong and Singapore, or among overseas Chinese throughout Southeast Asia.

Across Hong Kong’s border, in southeastern China, economic reforms and outside influence also are unleashing an energizing drive for money and a better life. Most of China, enervated by decades of Communist rule, still moves at a leisurely pace, often mindless of waste and inefficiency. But from Shanghai to Canton, the people of the southern coast are reasserting ancient business savvy.

Beijing decided in the late 1970s to allow parts of this region--especially Guangdong and Fujian provinces--to go “one step ahead” in economic reforms. But the strengths of the southern coast come not just from special favors. The people of the south have always been different. The new rules simply allow what has been suppressed inside to come bursting out again.

In the decade ahead, it will be these coastal and overseas Chinese, much more than the vast peasant masses of the Chinese interior, who are positioned to be powerful economic players on the Pacific Rim.

“Guangdong people give very strong support to the ideas of economic reform and opening to the outside world--this is their way of thinking, their demand, their dream,” said Chen Changuang, a spokesman for Wanbao Electrical Appliance Cooperative, China’s largest refrigerator exporter, which is based in the provincial capital at Canton. “So when the central government launched this policy, Guangdong people acted on it very quickly.”

The southern coast has long been a land populated by seekers of a better life. For centuries, southerners have tried to ignore the capital’s brutal politics, as they do today. They have been happy to escape the conservatism and grinding poverty of the rural north. The south has been a frontier--a land populated by newcomers from the north, a land looking out to uncertain but beckoning opportunities across the sea.

“Canton opened to the outside relatively early,” said Xu Zhi, director of the Canton Economic Structural Reform Commission. A reporter assumed--mistakenly--that he was referring to changes that began in 1979.

Then Xu continued in a matter-of-fact manner flavored with a Chinese sense of time and history: “Its opening has a history of about 2,000 years. At first it was with Southeast Asia. Later there was trade with Europe and Africa. This history of opening to the outside world is comparatively long.”

The ancestors of most southern Chinese came from the north, gradually overwhelming the original inhabitants or driving them further south into what is now Vietnam. During the last few hundred years, large numbers of southern Chinese moved on again. Taiwan was populated largely by people from Fujian province, while Cantonese moved from Guangdong to Hong Kong, Macao, Southeast Asia and the United States.

Much as the Western frontier and a history of immigration shaped the American personality, the character of the coastal and overseas Chinese has been shaped by this centuries-old history of movement and foreign contact.

“Northern Chinese are bound by the traditional culture, by the political center and by the weather too, so they are very rigid,” said Ting Tin-yu, a professor of sociology at Taiwan National University.

“If you go to northern China, including Beijing and other provinces, everybody’s very rigid, very conservative, bound to the land, bound to the culture. But in southeast China (and) Taiwan, flexibility is always there. Everybody’s an immigrant. You can stay here or you can move somewhere else. To move overseas is not a particularly strange event. Having relatives overseas is normal.”

A Cantonese resident of Beijing said that the philosophy of Guangdong and Fujian people is, “ ‘Let’s go to whatever place is comfortable and happy.’ I don’t know who my ancestors were,” he added. “But I’m sure that they thought the north was unattractive. It was too poor and there was too much fighting. They said, ‘Let’s go south.’

“There is no high culture in the south. People in Guangdong and Fujian don’t have any deep philosophy. But they live better. They talk loudly. Eating comes first. They aren’t thinking deeply about anything. Cantonese are different from Beijing people. They’re more active and better at getting things done. A Beijing person is likely to think deeply about ideology, while a Guangdong person is likely to say, ‘Oh, let’s just do it!’ ”

Such attitudes were only reinforced when people ventured abroad. As newcomers in strange lands, the overseas Chinese had to hustle for a living, often turning to shopkeeping and trade. This created an energetic, open-minded and commercially oriented tradition that survives today.

A similar spirit grew in pre-revolutionary Shanghai, strongly influenced by foreigners and populated by people who came to seek their fortunes. Once the most cosmopolitan city in East Asia, Shanghai has been relatively slow in implementing economic reforms. But Shanghai people still consider themselves the most sophisticated in China. Plans are now under way to transform the city’s Pudong district into a modern financial and commercial center, an effort that aims to build on the city’s traditions.

As Beijing’s reform policies unleash bottled-up energy along the southern coast, the new openness also allows the people of this region to restore links with their distant cousins in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond. These ties now reinforce mutual prosperity and development.

“Historically we have had more overseas relationships and contacts with Hong Kong and Macao, so because of this we’re a bit faster in accepting new things,” said Zheng Weimin, an official with Guangdong Province’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office.

“Our main emphasis now is on developing the economy,” Zheng said. “There are more than 30 million overseas Chinese in the world, and more than 20 million of them are of Guangdong ancestry. Every corner of the world has Guangdong people. This creates favorable conditions for us.”

The Cantonese diaspora continues even today. The British colony of Hong Kong, primarily populated by Cantonese, is due to revert to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. While Beijing has promised that Hong Kong can retain its capitalist economic and social system for at least 50 years after the takeover, many of Hong Kong’s best-educated professionals are relocating overseas.

Such emigration, currently running at about 60,000 people a year, drains some of Hong Kong’s talent. But as these people resettle overseas, they retain links with Hong Kong and south China. Those left behind have new potential business partners abroad. Even people in Guangdong province, long likely to have Hong Kong kin, are increasingly likely to have close relatives in the United States, Canada, Australia or Europe.

At the same time as new emigrants head to the rich industrialized nations, ties between the southern China coast and the large overseas Chinese communities of Southeast Asia also remain strong.

All of these international connections can prove very useful in the business world.

Chen, the Wanbao official, said that his company bought a modern refrigerator assembly line from a Singapore company in 1981. “They were Singapore Chinese who could speak standard Chinese dialect,” Chen noted. “It’s a kind of assistance for our reform and opening up. This was the first import of modern refrigerator technology to China.”

Wanbao exported $50 million worth of refrigerators last year, primarily to Southeast Asia, and expects to double that this year, Chen said.

Gu Huamin, deputy director of Guangdong’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, said that overseas Chinese often provide direct assistance to their motherland. He noted that many Chinese, especially those who live overseas, believe in the traditional concept of feng shui , or Chinese divination, by which it is said that the location of a house, tomb or temple for worship of clan ancestors can have rather direct effects on one’s fortune.

“Their success in business overseas has a lot to do with the feng shui of their hometown,” Gu said. Many overseas Chinese believe that by fixing up their clan temple, they can protect the feng shui of their hometown and that this can bring them good luck, he explained.

Besides refurbishing clan temples, many overseas Chinese also contribute money to repair roads or build schools, centers for the elderly, hospitals, clinics, libraries and cultural buildings in their native places, Gu noted.

Gu, of Cantonese ancestry but born in Indonesia, moved to China as a young man in 1959. He attributes his own outgoing personality to his foreign experiences. “I’m back from overseas,” Gu said. “I talk with you casually. I make jokes. You’re American and I’m Chinese, but I’m very casual and talkative.”

Gu said that in general, “Cantonese can more quickly accept foreigners’ methods and ways of management. As they do business with people in inland provinces, they can also influence people of the interior,” he added.

The spirit of competition has been spreading once more in China only during the past decade, working its way in from the coast.

But Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore are among the most competitive societies on Earth. High population densities, natural resource shortages and free-market economic policies have reinforced the traditional dynamism of coastal and overseas Chinese life to give these places an extraordinary work ethic.

“Every day is a fight for survival,” said Ting, the Taipei sociology professor, when asked his thoughts on why a clothing shop owner such as carnival-style pitchman Tseng would work so hard to drum up customers. “If you don’t do that, you’re out of business. . . . In Taiwan, if you don’t fight, if you don’t strike for survival, you’re out. I’ve never seen a guy who is successful who only works eight hours a day. That’s the situation for Hong Kong and Taiwan. Singapore too.”

If China succeeds in unleashing this competitive spirit, then parts of the southern Chinese coast are positioned to become “a second, third, fourth Hong Kong or Taiwan,” Ting said.

Given their large populations and unfettered access to China’s domestic market, these regions could someday surpass Taiwan and Hong Kong in terms of their impact on the Pacific Rim, he predicted.

“They can be more powerful,” he said. “We should see this possibility.”

COLONY OF CAPITALISM Hong Kong, a British colony covering 414 square miles off China’s southeast coast, will be returned to China in 1997. Hong Kong’s economy is externally oriented and dependent on trade with the rest of the world, and China has agreed that this status will be retained after 1997. Here is a glimpse of Hong Kong: * Hong Kong is the world’s largest exporter of watches. * More than half of the world’s toys are manufactured in Hong Kong. * Hong Kong is the fourth-largest gold market after London, Zurich and New York. Between $300 million and $400 million is traded on the exchange floor each day. * Hong Kong is the world’s third-largest diamond trading center after New York and Antwerp. * Hong Kong has the world’s biggest single air cargo terminal, handling 800,000 tons of freight worth $33 billion in 1990. * After China, Hong Kong is the largest apparel supplier to the United States. * Traffic density is among the highest in the world, with 316 vehicles per mile. * In 1989, 900 U.S. firms operated in Hong Kong. * In 1988, Hong Kong was the third-greatest importer of U.S. fresh oranges ($40 million) and cigarettes ($348 million). Source: Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, San Francisco