CLAD in Chinese peasant dress, the young woman fell to the ground in terror. A Japanese soldier raised his sword above her head.
"Stop! Stop!" she cried. "I'm Japanese too." The soldier paused. "Why are you wearing Chinese clothes then? You know I have to rape and kill all Chinese people," he said crossly. "Because an old Chinese man saved me from drowning and gave me this dress," she wailed.
Just then, they heard the sound of a pager beeping. "Oh, excuse me," said the warrior, groping under his uniform. "I have to call someone. He muttered to the damsel in distress, who raised her eyes to heaven, then reached into her bosom and produced a mobile phone.
The audience in the Heyuan Theatre at first didn't know quite what to make of this until an actor playing a film director also appeared on stage and roundly abused the "soldier" for ruining his take. It was a play within a play. And the actors could never get the movie scene finished because the pagers of all three kept going off.
The sketch was a satire on modern life in China. Heyuan is a struggling city in an impoverished area of northern Guangdong Province, but even here modern technology is all intrusive. The people crowding into the hall were asked to switch off their cell phones and pagers before the curtain went up on a medley of song, mime, comedy and propaganda in what turned out to be no ordinary concert.
It was in fact a super patriotic show performed on a muggy night in Heyuan last week by an ensemble of top artistes from Beijing, sent by the Ministry of Culture to entertain and educate audiences in towns all along the 2,000 kilometre, North South railway, in celebration of the opening of the final rail link on the line between Beijing and Hong Kong on July 1st.
That is the day China takes back the British colony, a matter of great pride, and we got A Song Of Appraisal Of Our Public Servant, Kong Fansen a model Communist Party official who died from overwork in Tibet in 1994 and a melody in praise of the country's border guards, called To Say A Word From My Heart.
A singer in white uniform warbled:
To say a word from my heart,
My mother already has white hairs.
My girlfriend is waiting for me.
Bat if there is no one willing to be a soldier,
The irony for the enthusiastic Guangdong audience is that come July 1st the border guards will not just be protecting the country's frontiers but will be keeping Chinese people from travelling freely to Hong Kong, despite the new rail link and all the celebrations to mark the return of the former British colony. Under Deng Xiaoping's formula of "one country two systems" Hong Kong stays a capitalist enclave within China, and off limit to millions of Chinese.
Standing next day on the green Astroturf lining the flat roof of the Chinese customs post at the border with Hong Kong on the outskirts of Shenzhen, 180 kilometres to the south, I could see a razorwire border fence coiling along the narrow, stinking Shenzhen river in both directions. This will not disappear like the Berlin Wall when Hong Kong is reunited with the motherland.
Indeed, even getting into the border town of Shenzhen is not easy for Chinese people. Since it was designated a special economic zone in 1980 it has been cut off from the rest of China by an 86 kilometre backup electric fence, and to enter from the Chinese side means passing through another "frontier" post. The reality is that here in the rich Pearl River Delta there is "one country three systems".
After July 1st, customs inspection will continue on the Hong Kong border, if anything more rigorously than before. Officials on the Chinese side pull in 150 vehicles every day for X ray examination in giant, decontaminated bays using sophisticated equipment supplied by British Aerospace. White coated border guards operate image interpreter computer screens, zooming in on truck sections to check the cargo images with the manifest. They regularly find contraband. An official proudly displayed a skeletal photograph of a lorry showing the fuel tanks to be full of (what else?) smuggled mobile telephones and pagers.
The reality also is that more people and vehicles cross the Shenzhen Hong Kong border every day than at any other land port in Asia. The crossing point handled 8.5 million vehicles and 63 million people in 1996. The numbers will go up this year. The existence of the border will prevent a mass movement of Chinese fortune seekers to Hong Kong, but it will be no barrier to increased trade and investment, and the emergence of the Pearl River Delta -Hong Kong region as one of the biggest markets in the Asia Pacific.
Shenzhen, little more than a village two decades ago, is getting more like Hong Kong all the time. It boasts 46,100 mobile telephones. Since it was declared a special economic zone in 1980, foreign investment has flowed into the city, which has more than 600 buildings over 18 storeys high. One's perception of Shenzhen depends where one is coming from. If from China, then it is a spectacular city of skyscrapers, shopping malls and orderly free ways; if from Hong Kong it is a rather gaudy satellite city with undisciplined traffic, no decent newspapers and call girls in the hotel bars.
It is now sufficiently attractive, however, for some Hong Kong people to move here and commute to work. "You can buy 10 Shenzhen apartments for the price of one in Hong Kong," said Guangdong's executive vice governor, Zhang Gaoli. Many Hong Kong truck drivers, who earn 25 times the average Shenzhen salary, have bought apartments in Shenzhen and installed mistresses from among the thousands of young Chinese women drawn to the boom city. One suburb is known as "second wives village". "The Hong Kong wife doesn't know and the Chinese wife doesn't care," said a party official.
Maybe now something mighty change, he mused. "In the past 10 years - so many Hong Kong men try to find an ideal wife in Guangdong and in the next two years perhaps a number of Hong Kong girls will try to find husbands in Shenzhen because now the living standard is quite good. Better ask Hong Kong ladies. Maybe the Guangdong men are more loyal."
Everyone in authority exudes confidence that Hong Kong's inclusion in China will mean a great leap forward. Li You Wei, the city's Communist Party secretary, said that with the restoration of Chinese sovereignty they could proceed faster with the reform drive and opening up. "The trend of mutual prosperity will be enhanced and there will be a transfer back of the labour intensive industries which made Shenzhen a backyard for the front shop of Hong Kong," he predicted.
When I asked him if China's communist system might be destabilised by the inclusion of capitalist Hong Kong, he replied tartly: "Shenzhen has been an economic zone for 17 years, it is very close to Hong Kong, its indigenous residents have relatives and friends in Hong Kong. People can watch Hong Kong TV stations. If that doesn't influence the system in one city it will not destabilise a whole country."
But regionalism is strong in Guangdong province, which some refer to as Greater Hong Kong. Freeflowing investment mainly from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Singapore has given the province of 70 million people an incredible average growth rate of 18 per cent for the last decade. It has concentrated people's minds on money and distanced them from Beijing's ideology.
"The mountains are high and the emperor is far away," runs an ancient Chinese proverb. In meeting party officials, little mention was made of the current Chinese leadership. But there was effusive praise for the late Deng Xiaoping, who started the openness policy, and gave it new life in a historic visit to Shenzhen in 1992 when he shocked the party by extolling the virtues of foreign investment.
ONCE known as Canton, Guangzhou is a two hour drive inland from Shenzhen along a toll highway built by Hong Kong businessman, Gordon Wu. When I asked a Shenzhen hotel porter to arrange a taxi, he said the official rate was 1,000 yuan (about £80) but that he could get me a private ride for half that price. I found myself in a Camray driven by a provincial official who kept stopping to change his number plates, first as he left Shenzhen, then at the economic zone border, and finally outside Guangzhou.
Guangzhou is a smogladen city of office towers, stores, boutiques, bars and motor cycles, like Taipei or Bangkok. Everywhere one hears jack hammers and "Cantopop" from radio stations. It has swish five star hotels and a market which has been compared to a take away zoo, where snakes, scorpions, dried grasshoppers, tortoises, and dogs are offered as delicacies. People here worry less about Hong Kong "contaminating" Guangdong than they do in Hong Kong about China changing their system, said a Western resident. They desperately want continued access to the uncensored Hong Kong media to make informed business decisions.
Out in the countryside, where paddyfields rise above each other like terraced mirrors, the investment boom has brought mixed blessings. Ugly building sites have been carved out off the red earth. In some towns, such as Heyuan, whole streets are lined with half finished buildings, abandoned by investors who had hoped in vain to push up land values.
There are success stories too, such as the American TCBY ice cream and yogurt plant in Heyuan, a classic example of foreign investment combining with cheap labour. The milk comes from New Zealand and the chocolate from the US, and 70 per cent of the product goes for export. The workers are mostly young people from other parts of China. One young woman said she gets 700 yuan (about £60) a month but sleeps eight to a room and pays to watch television.
Most people like her believe they will never see Hong Kong. "It will be difficult to go there. And I wouldn't know what to do there if I could. And I couldn't afford it," she said. But she added: "The days when anyone could humiliate China are gone." Such sentiments are common in Guangdong. Even those who will not benefit from Hong Kong's return feel a surge of patriotic pride. The days of Japanese invasion and British occupation are gone though not forgotten: the ministry of culture in Beijing will see to that.