Dr Eden Woon Yi-teng, the chamber's first ethnic Chinese director, has been helping it find its way. A Hong Kong returnee, Dr Woon's life history would both impress and bewilder the old colonial barons.

Dr Woon is as different from his predecessors as Guinness is from Qingdao Beer. He speaks Mandarin, Cantonese and English - as well as the dialects of big business, high diplomacy and the civil service. Some days you can hear him on the radio in the morning, read him in the newspapers during the day, and watch him on television in the evening - in all three languages.

Equal parts showman, policy wonk, and street fighter, Dr Woon has brought a measure of cosmopolitan style, public spirit and dynamism to the chamber that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

Worried about the recession? The chamber has spearheaded an employment scheme for university graduates, which is being adopted rapidly by other business associations in Hong Kong. It urged its members to supply 'one company, one job' and within two days came up with 50 each from two member companies, Wheelock and Wharf Holdings. Other job offers were 'pouring in', Dr Woon said. 'The campaign provides a necessary lift, though not a solution, to the doom and gloom of the employment picture here.'

Concerned about Hong Kong's future? The chamber has pulled from its pocket a proposal for a Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (Cepa) with China that will give Hong Kong a head start as China lowers trade and investment barriers to meet its commitments as a member of the World Trade Organisation.

Fed up with the timidity, inertia, and in-fighting of Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa's administration? You can count on Dr Woon to be blunt in his opinions, at least. 'When I tangle with the civil service, I know what I am talking about because I was one of them for 22 years,' he said.

Dr Woon says he is not solely responsible for the chamber's multifaceted activism, but it is hard to imagine it happening without him. 'I give a lot of credit to my staff, who have embraced the new attitudes, and to successive chairmen and general committee members who supported the necessary changes after 1997,' he said.

Dr Woon has galvanised the chamber by broadening its membership base to include more foreign and Chinese multinationals. He maintains that the chamber's strength, like Hong Kong, is its 'international constituency'.

Foreign-invested firms now make up 25 per cent of membership. Another 5 per cent are mainland Chinese.

The core membership is still small- and medium-sized service, trade, and manufacturing companies, largely under local Chinese ownership. Such companies drive the Hong Kong economy and are spearheading its integration into the Pearl River Delta.

Yet the new chamber members are beginning the process by which Hong Kong acknowledges that it is not simply a collection of expatriates and locals, but a product of cultural fusion with sparks flying off it.

Dr Woon said the the chamber was a microcosm of Hong Kong: 'If we can be both local and foreign, why can't Hong Kong? That's our niche.'

Hong Kong's greatest weaknesses, he said, were its political culture and surprising insecurity, with people spending more time wondering who they might please or offend than thinking through positions, and where people in power were used to horse trading in back rooms.

'You've really got to wade in. Not only do you have to argue the issues but be very conscious who is for and who is against,' Dr Woon said.

Under Dr Woon, chamber seminars and conferences make ample use of his skills as moderator and gadfly, and regularly feature the big names of international business as well as senior Hong Kong and Chinese officials.

Dr Woon startles his speakers with tough and irreverent questions, and sometimes goads them with sharp reviews. His humour is often direct.

After a particularly opaque lunchtime session with Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, Dr Woon said: 'It's like some people bought tickets to watch France at the World Cup and found Senegal in the stadium.'

Hong Kong audiences, accustomed to a much less challenging standard, complain that Dr Woon is 'too serious'. But they regularly jam a casual series in the chamber's Admiralty offices, which Dr Woon has turned into the city's most stimulating talk shop.

In issues as in style, Dr Woon has broken new ground and annoyed some of Hong Kong's elite with his combativeness and his ideas. Probably the most controversial proposal in which he has played a role is Cepa, aka the Hong Kong-China Free Trade Agreement, which the chamber first proposed in a study two years ago.

In November, a few weeks before Mr Tung met Vice-Minister for Foreign Trade Long Yongtu, the chamber wrote a letter to Mr Tung reminding him of the study. Mr Long emerged from the meeting agreeing to 'seriously consider' a deal.

'We've always been integrated with China. All we're talking about is taking it to a higher level. Economic integration is not about occupying a privileged place. We have to add value, and our value is adding the international connection,' Dr Woon said.

'My view of China is that yes, China is doing great, but it's nowhere near as economically sophisticated or as powerful as people make it out to be. People have a hard time getting between the two extremes of China - as one billion people eating McDonald's and the house of cards collapsing.

'That's why Hong Kong has a real role, because China needs real help.'

Dr Woon said the only things standing in the way of a 'higher level' of integration with China were lack of imagination and timidity.

'A lot of this is a mind-set problem. Why can't Hong Kong be like Fifth Avenue and Shenzhen like New Jersey? Why should you be stuck here if you want to get a job in Guangzhou? Why can't goods just easily come down here from factories in Guangdong? Why shouldn't the roads there link up with the roads here? Why not a 24-hour through bus?' he said.

Born in Shanghai and a refugee at the age of two, in 1949 he moved to Hong Kong where he lived first in a hillside shantytown and then the old walled city of Kowloon before moving to more comfortable surroundings in Tsim Sha Tsui. His father, Raymond Woon, was an intellectual fleeing the anti-bourgeois persecution of the early Mao years.

The next move, when he was 12, was to Iowa City, where he burrowed into mathematics as a calling and profession.

Dr Woon spent the late 1970s as a mathematics professor at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and most of the 1980s and early 1990s as one of the Pentagon's chief experts on China. He was China adviser to United States Vice-President Richard Cheney during his stint as defence secretary under the administration of George Bush Snr.

In 1994, he retired from the Pentagon to become director of the Washington State China Relations Council, a largely business-focused group where he made a name for himself in the annual lobbying effort to renew China's most-favoured-nation status.

Biography

Eden Woon Yi-teng,55, is a mathematician with degrees from the University of Iowa and University of Washington. He was a US Air Force officer for 22 years from 1972, retiring as a colonel. From 1994 to 1997 he was director of the Washington State China Relations Council. Since 1997, he has been executive director of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce.