HIGHER SOCIETY

The first group are journalists -- the blue-jeans brigade, as one editor calls them -- milling about, scanning the room for famous faces. The others are Hong Kong's socialites, grouped in gossiping circles, clearly waiting for something to happen. A tuxedoed man walks over to take the elbow of a sequin-dressed woman and gives her an air-kiss, MWAH! That's it. A bank of photographers suddenly advances through the crowd, auto-winders whirring. The pair hold their pose for a moment longer, and then a moment more, as the photographers shift their angles. Suddenly, at the other end of the room, a quartet of spectacularly beautiful young women stalks in, wrapped in cling-tight black dresses. The photographers wheel off in their direction.

The scene is the marbled entrance of the ballroom of Hong Kong's Grand Hyatt hotel. And the event is The Canadian Foundation for the Preser-vation of Chinese Cultural and Historical Treasure Gala Dinner, a semi-obscure function at the tail-end of the social season. Even so, the roster of guests is impressive. Jewelry dealer Ronald Abram arrives with his wife, Joyce, followed by fabulously wealthy charity queen Alice Chiu and cigar-puffing entrepreneur and friend of royalty David Tang. As more and more celebrities arrive, the photographers grow increasingly agitated, elbowing their way through the crowd, turning their flashes on anyone remotely famous.

These days, Hong Kong's social scene is undergoing as profound a sea-change as any in the territory's century-and-a-half history. As 1997 draws near, the expatriates who long dominated society life are fading into obscurity. At the same time, Chinese women, content for years to play a largely ornamental role, are wielding increasing power.

The pre-dinner cocktail time is really a photo call, a frenetic series of publicity moments. The press has just a half-hour or so to catch the mingling celebrities. Attention turns to the newly arrived Patrick Tse Yin, a former movie star turned businessman who is squiring -- to everyone's surprise -- his wife. Gossip had them separated. Millionaire social queen and high-flying banker Kathy Chiu is also here, as usual, looking glamorous but slightly overwhelmed, frozen for the cameramen like a deer caught in headlights. Buttonholed by a reporter, she turns, smiles graciously and introduces a prosperous, but as yet unfamous, couple. "Kathy is the most humble and the most generous woman I know," the woman gushes.

It is all, in its way, perfectly excruciating. "People are bored. There are far too many balls," laments David Tang, owner, among other interests, of the provocatively sumptuous and very trendy China Club. "Those of us who go to them find them a complete strain. It's such a slog. It's so boring. I hate it." Nevertheless, he admits he goes to quite a few balls. "Hundreds," he says, with deliberate exaggeration. "I overdo it a bit."

So why do some of the wealthiest, most powerful people in Hong Kong subject themselves, on a regular basis, to a ritual that is as tedious as it is expensive? Why do they expose themselves to the scrutiny of the press, to unflattering gossip and, occasionally, to libelous attacks? Because all this glamour and show doesn't mean a thing if no one knows about it. That's why the socialites, so many millions of dollars above the jeans-clad lumpenproletariat of the press corps, must subject themselves to the indignity of the photo opportunity. In a town where wealth is the arbiter of everything, the millionaires act out a theater of glamour in which money earns exposure and exposure means more money.

One mid-morning in early summer, Kathy Chiu sits over a cup of coffee in David Tang's China Club. Housed in a sandstone fortress overlooking the sweltering streets of the Central financial district, the club is decorated in the style of Shanghai in the 1920s. White-jacketed waiters pad silently through the air-conditioned coolness, carrying a refill for etched-crystal glasses.

"I'm not going to balls any more," Chiu declares. "I don't want the press taking my picture." She doesn't mean it. In a few days' time she will be photographed at yet another Grand Hyatt fundraiser. What she means is that she feels mistreated by the press. "Once, when I wore a backless dress to a ball, they wrote that I was trying to look sexy. And because I'm single, whoever sits beside me is written up as my boyfriend. Once I went to a ball with my girlfriend's boyfriend -- her divorce hadn't come through yet, so she couldn't be seen in public with him -- and they made up a quote about us saying that our interest in each other was mutual."

It clearly irritates Chiu to be taken as a flighty dilettante, for she is not. Worth an estimated $12 million, recently divorced from her husband of 20 years, attractive, engaging, she could retire from the social scene for good if she cared to. It would be society's loss, not hers. Along with her friends Jennifer Tose, who runs a cosmetics company, and Alice Chiu, who sits on the board of a half-dozen companies, she is one of a new generation of female socialites who have managed to parlay their wealth into real business power.

"People think I'm an entertainer," she says. "Actually, I'm a businesswoman. People who read about me in the papers are misled. All they see is sexy bodies at balls, and they think that's all we do. I worked until 11 o'clock last night, but no one sees that."

Kathy Chiu was born into wealth. Her father, Chiu Sheang Chow, was a prominent Hong Kong film producer who made his money in property. Once upon a time she might have been expected to become a tai-tai, a woman of leisure whose occupation consisted of shopping, gala-hopping and occasionally giving birth. Instead, she has taken on a full-time career as senior vice-president of the Republic Bank of New York. Along the way, her social skills, contacts and money have helped. "When I was living in Toronto, my father-in-law bought us a beautiful house with a heated swimming pool," she says. "Our next-door neighbor only had a tennis court, and he wanted to swim. So he gave me a job in his bank. That's how I got started."

Chiu, a Canadian citizen, is sensitive to any suggestion that she got ahead on the basis of anything but skill. "When women like me have jobs, everyone thinks it's related to your family or your husband. They don't think it's from your brain power." But is it true in some cases? "In some cases," she nods. Pausing to take one of a series of calls on her mobile phone, she folds up the receiver and reports: "I'm raising $350 million in a syndication deal." Another call comes in a few minutes later. "I have to change my ticket. Tomorrow I'm flying to Osaka, and then I have another meeting in Tokyo." Again: "Another function! They want me to cut the ribbon at the launching of a new cigarette brand, and to invite all my friends. I told them I'd think about it."

The connections forged and cemented at high-society functions extend far beyond Hong Kong's narrow borders. These days, the super-rich are a transnational race. "I saw the American president, Mr. Clinton, in Washington last week," Chiu remarks. "I was invited to a ball. They know I'm a banker with lots of connections in China, and they want to do business there. I knew my friends wouldn't believe me, so I got a lot of souvenirs and T-shirts and had a picture taken with Mrs. President. I've met Charles, Diana, talked to the Queen."

ANOTHER NIGHT, ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPHERS' SCRUM. It is the AIDS Concern Ball, a gala dinner raising money for a charity few of Hong Kong's upper classes would normally care to associate with. But thanks to Jennifer Tose, top socialite and wife of Peregrine financial house chairman Philip Tose, the glamour and the corporate sponsorships have been laid on thick. Tose, in a green satin bodice and long, bell-shaped skirt, sweeps in with her entourage. A wall of flash cameras elbows its way forward. The crowd tonight is even more replete than usual with leggy women, thanks to the participation of Elite Models Inc., which will be running a catwalk show. A sudden hubbub of minders erupts and a corridor is cleared. Supermodel Linda Evangelista sweeps in, surrounded by an entourage of chisel-jawed young men.

For all the high-powered sponsorships, few guests tonight are wearing the red ribbons that signify support for the fight against AIDS. In fact, in the jumble of cocktails, free promotional cigars, strutting models and the assorted trappings of self-promotion, it's easy to forget that, buried under everything, is a charity event.

For top-end luxury-goods companies, attracting Hong Kong's wealthiest and most glamorous to a branded event is the best kind of advertising imaginable. Companies like Piaget and Chanel specialize in wooing the glitterati, hosting black-tie product launches and sponsoring charity functions. If they are skillful enough and attractive enough, these companies' public relations ladies can come to be accepted as full-blown members of the glamour set.

But for newcomers, the only way into the highest circles of society is to hire a ball organizer with the right connections. Indeed, despite the socialites' air of gracious sociability, the hard reality of money underlies everything. Event organizers such as former Miss Hong Kong Elaine Sung or Pansy Ho Hui, the daughter of casino magnate Stanley Ho, can create an event from scratch, taking care of everything from cut flowers and place cards to press kits and mediagenic guests -- for a price. Pansy Ho Hui's company, Occasions, is particularly esteemed. "Occasions has impeccable connections within the Chinese community," says expat lawyer and socialite Ted Marr. "If you want the best rent-a-crowd for your product launch, then I suppose you would get Pansy. She snaps her fingers and her friends all assemble."

PR companies can do the nitty-gritty work of ball organization, but no one can attract funds like a real socialite. When Kathy Chiu organized the Community Chest fundraiser last year, Ferrari donated nearly $90,000 to cover the cost of food. Says Chiu: "It's good business for them. The people who can pay HK$150,000 [about $19,000] per seat at a dinner are their target audience." Chiu, unsurprisingly, is the enthusiastic owner of a black Ferrari.

But, if money buys access, then the reverse is also true: those without lots of money, no matter how bona fide their social credentials, must inevitably drift toward the margin. Nowhere is this clearer than in the slow fading in recent years of the expatriate crowd. Observes Chiu: "At the Community Chest ball I organized, a seat at the the head table cost HK$150,000. Not many gweipohs [literally, ghost woman, but, these days, meaning foreign woman] can afford that kind of money."

Jennifer Tose confirms that localization in the run-up to 1997 is thinning expatriate ranks. "Fifteen years ago, when I started, most of the charity events were organized by gweipohs. In the last five years more Chinese women have started to take over. [Expat women's] husbands are being replaced and sent back home as more and more Chinese take over top positions."

Few Westerners have been as well positioned to watch the changes as Australian lawyer and bon vivant Marr, who specializes in orchestrating lavish parties in impoverished countries. Rakishly debonair, with a continental flair for combining seedy elegance with an ever-so-faint air of permanent hangover, Marr speaks with a theatrical voice that lends itself to the giving and receiving of gossip. Two years ago, in a much-publicized rift, he left his law firm after becoming too engrossed with the party business. Now, working at a new firm, Marr spends half his time practicing law and the rest organizing parties.

Money, he agrees, is behind the change in high society. "Who's rich here? Who's out spending money? It's all the Chinese," he says. "So, of course, they're going to dominate the social pages. It's the evolution of society." In fact, an expat social scene still exists, but it is an altogether less tony affair. At the balls Marr organizes -- Shanghai and Zimbabwe have been venues in recent years -- the guests are expatriates and overseas-educated Chinese, and the emphasis is on staying up all night, getting drunk and wearing silly clothes. "People like Jennifer Tose and Alice Chiu wouldn't even contemplate going to one of my balls," he confesses. "I occasionally wash up on the same beach as Jennifer Tose, but she is sensationally rich, and I'm not. So there's a natural separation."

What will happen to the glitterati after 1997, when Hong Kong will be dancing to a different tune? Whatever anxieties they may harbor, the rich are not allowing them to show. Certainly, there is no talk of toning down the ostentation. Says Jennifer Tose: "I don't know anything about politics and I don't want to know anything about politics." For all that, most of them probably know enough to have a foreign passport and a home waiting overseas.

China Club-owner Tang is an enthusiastic student of the interface between modern, Westernized Hong Kong and the neo-feudalism of the mainland. On a typically busy weekday morning, he strides into his office clutching an enormous cigar and wearing a trademark white silk Chinese blouse. The room is like a Ralph Lauren version of an English gentleman's study crossed with the back room of a New York art gallery: crammed with Chinese pop art, a mock fireplace, leather armchairs, book-lined shelves and antique tassel-fringed lamps. The man is as frenetic as his decor, barking orders to his secretary, popping vitamin pills, flinging himself into a chair and then leaping up again to take a phone call. "Right!" he hollers as he hangs up. "No more calls!"

Settling into an overstuffed armchair and propping up his feet, Tang identifies the ball-going classes as an essential manifestation of the bourgeois mentality. "If you're a part of an emerging upper class, you want to show off your baubles, your high-slit, clingy dresses. You only buy something so that you can show it off. That's the whole point of the bourgeoisie. People go to an event to show off. They buy these things and then they need a ball to go to." To be sure, he says, the charities benefit enormously from the existence of the socialites. "Even so," he adds, "the whole thing stinks a bit. Not to be too derogatory about it, one has to be immune to the superficiality of these occasions. Balls aren't about sympathy, they're about extravagance." And, he might have added, about sexual power.

Even the most cursory glance at the entrance of the Grand Hyatt ballroom re-veals a vast gap between the male and female roles. The men stand stiffly, clutching Champagne glasses and chomping cigars. The wo-men, languid and feline, repose coolly, ornamental in their body-cleaving gowns, glittering diamond-studded chokers, black sequins, translucent black lace, immaculate hair and flawless makeup. The undercurrent of eroticism is undeniable. Here, women are the focus of attention, the masters, if only for the night, of all the wealth their conjugal unions can muster. The chiming of a xylophone signals the end of cocktail hour, and the guests gradually filter into the grand ballroom.

On a massive stage draped with sherbet-purple drapes, a pianist is playing. As the guests settle into their seats, beauty-pageant-winner-turned-PR-maven Elaine Sung takes the stage in a pink cheongsam and reads out a boiler-plate welcome to the assembled VIPs. After 40 minutes of speech-reading and an hour of dinner -- suckling pig, Yunnan ham, shark's fin soup, abalone -- it's time for the main event of the evening: a fundraising auction. Sung works the crowd shamelessly, teasing out bids from a start of $10,000 for a pair of diamond-studded watches. At $18,000, the momentum slows. "Mr. Fang, isn't it time you presented your wife with a lovely gift?" she coos to a frequent bidder. Mr. Fang, pinned in the beam of a spotlight that sweeps the tables in search of bidders, raises his hand sheepishly. Onward the bids climb, each participant displayed on a giant screen on the stage. When the hammer comes down, the watches have sold for $22,000.

The last item of the evening is a large and kitschy painting of a stone Buddha, starting at a "very, very reasonable" $28,000. As a Chinese gentlemen cheerfully waves his hand for a bid of $71,000, the roving camera flashes his expression, enormously magnified, on to the screen. The European man sitting next to him looks pale, almost shocked. When the hammer finally comes down, the painting has gone for $90,000. "That's how to make a mark on society," a woman diner remarks.

What we are witnessing is a theater of seduction. The women signal their availability with body-hugging satin and dazzling jewelry, and the men compete for their attention by flaunting their financial potency. In a society where the line between love and trade has always been blurred, the proceedings are an elaborate form of sexual ritual.

Such incitements inevitably yield indiscretions. The life span of some glitterati marriages is less than that of an inbred poodle, and the breakups, when they come, are liable to be spectacular. The most public in recent memory was that of Cecil Chao and Terri Holladay. For two years ex-model Holladay, now 27, had been regaled as the woman who had finally brought the unweddable 58-year-old Chao to the altar. Exquisitely beautiful, fabulously wealthy thanks to her new husband's real estate fortune, Holladay enjoyed a spectacular reign as queen of the socialites.

That ended abruptly when she fled Hong Kong with her two-year-old son, Roman, in early May. There were reports of a fight in a hotel, of threats of violence. From her new base in Florida, Terri claimed Cecil had been unfaithful. And, to top it all off, she declared, she had found out their marriage had never been valid. The unweddable Cecil, it turned out, had escaped the altar after all.

In the split-level living room of his home, Happy Mansion, the property tycoon sprawls back on a sofa and gazes out at the ships steaming through the East Lamma Channel. The house, which he designed himself, is the quintessential late-'70s bachelor pad, with a spiral staircase, reel-to-reel tape deck, a two-meter-high abstract sculpture and a pair of Ming vases. "I don't know why Terri has said the things she has," he says with an expression of pained bafflement. "The breakup was negotiated with lawyers. There was nothing like any scenes in a hotel. I don't know where she got that story." One thing he agrees with, though: they were never married. "She always knew she was not married," he says. "Let's not talk about it any more."

Like most socialites, Chao has a tempered affection for the media. "I suppose when you're young, you like to be rich and famous. But when you get older, you like to be left alone to a certain extent. I prefer to be more quiet, but some newspapers send people to wait outside my gate for 24 hours."

Chao's new girlfriend appears at the top of the spiral staircase. She winds her way down and joins him on the couch. Barefoot, wearing hot pants, a translucent knit top and no bra, Michelle is the sort of woman who can stir feelings in even the most jaded of men. She lingers for a few moments, mostly ignored by Chao, and then wanders off to get a glass of water.

It is possible to see in men like Cecil Chao the fault lines that run through the whole of Hong Kong's high society -- a self-centered arrogance that denies any reflection or thought of greater purpose, a craven worship of material wealth, a profound selfishness that propels its victims from one sterile coupling to the next. It is also possible to see Chao as a hero of his age, a man who pursues what he desires with enormous appetite and with no regrets, who basks in the spotlight of admiration and who, however, obliquely, gives his time to the business of raising money for charity; in short, a model for all who would follow him.

The multi-millionaire has been portrayed in both ways in the press; not just this year, but for decades. Holladay, after all, was the third woman to bear a child of his out of wedlock. For his own part, he sees no need to change his ways. "I don't see myself getting married in the future. Bachelor life suits me," he says.

He leans back, one arm around Michelle, who has returned to cuddle at his side. Through the panoramic windows, the ocean lies peaceful under cloud-flocked skies. "I will continue to go to balls, but to a lesser extent," he says. "Human beings in Hong Kong cannot live without a social life."