THERE WAS AN intriguing finale to last week's swearing-in ceremony for Tung Chee-hwa and his new ministers. After the chief executive and his team had taken their oaths, and President Jiang Zemin and Mr Tung had made their speeches, they all settled down to a brief cultural performance at the Convention and Exhibition Centre.
It was not a programme of classical or contemporary Chinese music that government officials had put together. Rather, it was an eclectic collection of Western music ranging from Chopin to George Gershwin.
Dressed in cowboy hats and bandanas, young Hong Kongers energetically tap-danced and sang their way through I Got Rhythm and I Can't Be Bothered Now, Gershwin songs from the 1930s, as they celebrated the fifth anniversary of the former British colony's return to the motherland.
I wonder what Mr Jiang made of it. Watching him sit impassively in the front row, as the performers tapped their heels and toes in front of him singing: 'I got rhythm, I got music, I got my man, who could ask for anything more? I got daisies, in green pastures, I got my man, who could ask for anything more?', it was difficult not to imagine him, perhaps not for the first time, puzzling over what Hong Kong was all about.
Why were these Hong Kong performers singing American musicals on what was a solemn national occasion? His applause at the end of the show was measured, unlike the enthusiastic applause of the Hong Kong dignitaries.
Just minutes earlier, he had delivered a speech that indicated some frustration with the emotional and cultural gap that still existed between the motherland and its special autonomous region. He urged the people of Hong Kong to enhance their sense of the country and of the nation, and hoped that people of all circles would do a still better job in adapting themselves to the new Hong Kong. Here was evidence that the new Hong Kong is still a very different place from the rest of China - a case of one country, two cultures.