SHE'S BEEN DUBBED 'a flesh bomb' throughout her acting career; she was forced to call in the receivers in her 20s; her ex-husband took out newspaper advertisements to declare that he didn't father their daughter. None of these setbacks rattles Tina Leung Kwok-hing today - she describes it all in a matter of fact way, as if reading from a screenplay. Yet mention communism, and the composed facade crumbles. Seemingly, not even a broken marriage can compare with the anguish she feels at the triumph of capitalism in China. 'I had all the fame and fortune that I could want, but I threw it all away and returned to the mainland to work for socialism,' says Leung. 'But now it's like, as Marx had said, we have to become a capitalist society before we move on to a communist one. But I've spent so many years in a capitalist society in Hong Kong and overseas - do I have to go through it all again?' She pauses as tears well in her eyes. 'Ah, it's quite depressing.' Such sentiments about China aren't entirely unheard of here - Hong Kong has its share of disgruntled former left-wing radicals - but what casts Leung apart was how she arrived at such ideals. Now a wealthy businesswoman selling satellite navigation technology in Europe, Leung isn't known for her political activism. Rather, her claim to fame remains her showbiz career. Her exotic-sounding stage name, Ti Na, is forever attached to the racy films she made in the 1960s, as well as the many admirers she attracted and spurned. But Leung is back in Hong Kong to anchor A Century of China, an eight-part documentary about the history of 20th-century China that started on TVB last Wednesday. The entertainment press pester her for comments on the current batch of actors, but the scribbling stops when she launches a long discourse about the communists' role in the second world war. Leung is keenly aware of her saucy legacy, as she rails against how her interview on TVB's Hong Kong Live in March was handled. 'I wanted a live broadcast of my interview, but they just wouldn't agree,' she says. 'The result was that they cut out the bits of me talking about political and social issues - and what's left is the [showbiz-related] bits. It's sad, you know - local TV is sad. I tried once to turn the television on and support TVB a bit, but there's just no way I would watch any of the stuff.' She may loathe local television, but Leung is more than happy about her return to the limelight. Financial reward doesn't seem to be the motivating factor. Leung says the appeal is in being able to speak her mind about Chinese history. 'I will say things on the programme that will surprise people,' she says. Asked why the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy students in Beijing didn't feature in TVB's synopsis, Leung says she was 'quite angry' about the omission. 'June 4 was a very big event - if it's a part of history, then you can't not talk about it. Or else, you can't really call your programme A Century of China.' (Producers say the incident 'will be spoken about by our host impartially'.) As evidenced by her love-hate relationship with Hong Kong broadcasters and her dabbling with left-wing politics, Leung is a mixture of contradictions. She sprang to notoriety with roles in raunchy movies in the 1960s, winning admirers that included Hong Kong intellectuals as well as Thai aristocrats. But in less than a decade, she was proclaiming herself a supporter of proletarian revolution, and briefly returned to the mainland to work alongside the Red Guards, her interest stemming from her family's involvement in politics. In the 1980s, she reinvented herself yet again as a businesswoman who, among other ventures, helped China acquire sophisticated military and aeronautical equipment. Today, Leung does well for herself marketing Galileo, a global satellite navigation system launched by the European Space Agency. She's now based in Rome, having upped stakes in dismay at what she describes as the hypocrisy of Beijing in abandoning its pursuit of an egalitarian society in favour of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Yet for all her proletarian ideals, she holidays at a Portuguese villa, and is waited on by servants. 'If communism means having no shoes to wear, and being covered by 'revolutionary bugs' - that's what we called fleas back then - there's no way I'm going to follow you. I was there to lead them to become like me.' Leung insists she was never swayed by the glamour of movie-making, even as an impressionable schoolgirl. Spotted by a well- connected Thai aristocrat, who financed her film career, she was flown to Bangkok, where she found herself greeted by welcome banners and local VIPs. 'I still remember getting off the plane and thinking, 'What's so important about movies?'' she says. Nevertheless, Leung managed to make 54 films in the 1960s and 1970s. Most involved her 'being immersed in a bubble-filled bathtub, with me wearing flesh-coloured underwear and sticking a foot out of the water', she says. Leung was well-known for playing sexy girls in comedies (Chor Yuen's Wise Wives and Foolish Husbands) and thrillers (Yang Hsu-hsi's Diary of a Lady-killer). But it was her role in Lee Han-hsiang's The Warlord that etched Leung's image indelibly in Hong Kong's memory. Playing one of the warlord's wives, she was filmed emerging nude from a bath to greet a lover. Leung says she agreed to do the scene to help the distraught Lee, whose career was on the line after one flop too many. The director had promised she'd be shot from a distance, shielded by layers of gauze drapes, she says. Instead, she found not only three cameras, but a reporter taking snaps from an elevated gallery. 'I cried so hard on the set afterwards,' she says. 'It's not about having to undress, it's about why I was so stupid after all these years in showbiz. The way I went out of the way to help others and how they treated me in return.' The distressing experience drove her to quit films altogether. 'I was so cross with myself, that I was naive enough to believe all his sweet talk about being able to nurture my acting skills - instead, I was just another sex bomb.' Her subsequent exploits proved even more improbable than some of her film scripts. Professing to be a Maoist sympathiser, Leung donated large amounts of money to local left-wing organisations. By the mid-1970s, she had declared herself bankrupt. She insists that it wasn't a result of her extravagant lifestyle, but a deliberate act to express solidarity with workers on the mainland. Leung's brief time on the mainland during the Cultural Revolution opened her eyes. 'True, to mobilise the masses as a way of wielding [a power] struggle was wrong, but things were different when you looked at it from below,' Leung says. '[The Red Guards] were very young - all these young women were so clever and pretty, but without a thought for themselves. They really thought, like me, that it was the way to go, to sweep away the old and to bring in the new.' After the failed social experiment, Leung feverishly pursued business ventures on the mainland. In the process, she says, she helped introduce state-of-the-art air navigation systems to many Chinese airports. Not that such enterprises make her one of those despised capitalist-roaders. 'I'm not a red fat cat - I haven't profited from the Chinese people, not even one cent. My conscience is clear.' Leung's confidence is extraordinary, despite her chequered record. 'A lot of people on the mainland told me that if I wasn't a Miss Leung but a Mr Leung, things could have been different,' she says. 'A vice-mayor of Zhuhai even once said that it's a pity that I was born in China - if I was born elsewhere I could already have been prime minister with my abilities.' It's not just mainland history that is constantly being rewritten. A Century of China, TVB Jade, Wed, 11.05pm