美国国家公共电台 NPR How Hong Kong's Banks Turned Chinese

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

China is marking an anniversary this week - the 20th anniversary of Britain's handover of Hong Kong to Chinese control. That was a big moment in China's rise. And today, China can also celebrate the takeover of the city's lucrative 1 financial sector 2. NPR's Rob Schmitz reports.

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ROB SCHMITZ, BYLINE 3: Hong Kong, where the city's ubiquitous crosswalk signals sound like slot machines, directing thousands of white-shirted bank employees to work each morning. Twenty years ago, the traders and account managers crossing these streets were mostly expatriates and local Hong Kongers. When they got to work, much of their business was done in English. That's changed.

WILLIAM HON: Actually, Hong Kong is shifting its role from Asia financial center to supporting the growth of China.

SCHMITZ: William Hon works for Liquidnet, a U.S. equity 4 broker 5. He was born and grew up in Hong Kong, but at the office, he's finding more and more of his colleagues are from mainland China.

HON: More and more Chinese companies would like to list in Hong Kong exchange. So they are all in China, and they are talk - they're talking Mandarin 6. So they need more fluent Mandarin speaker in Hong Kong, or they hire people from China to work in Hong Kong so that they can, you know, communicate and talk, you know, effectively.

SCHMITZ: And that means a sea change is underway for the job prospects 7 of young Hong Kongers, says Andrew Collier, managing director of Orient Capital.

ANDREW COLLIER: It used to be that you got out of college in Hong Kong, and you were an invaluable 8 resource because you had some sort of Mandarin skills, you spoke 9 English. And you were trained in finance. And you had no competition.

SCHMITZ: Now, says Collier, that Hong Kong native is facing competition from even better-trained and harder-working mainland Chinese candidates.

COLLIER: A lot of them are moving from one province, where they went to get to their undergraduate degree. They may have gotten to graduate school, or even university, in another place like Beijing and Shanghai - thousands of miles away. And then if they speak English well, they would have been trained - additional training, schooling 10 or work in London or New York or Chicago or someplace like that. So by the time they come to Hong Kong, they're very, very sophisticated about how the world works.

SCHMITZ: There are people like Weiqi Zhu, a derivatives 11 trader at UBS in Hong Kong. Zhu grew up middle class in Shanghai, studied hard and ended up pursuing a Ph.D. in finance at Cornell University. He estimates Hong Kongers now make up only 5 to 10 percent of his department, whereas mainland Chinese like him make up around a third.

WEIQI ZHU: You need people who know mainland clients. You need people who knows, like, what to do to make money in China. You need to - people to know the rules - the financial rules in China and to know how you can make more money by knowing the rules.

SCHMITZ: Zhu remembers 20 years ago whenever Hong Kongers visited his hometown, he and his friends saw them as gods. Now, here on the trading floor in Hong Kong, he says, they're more like servants.

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SCHMITZ: Three years ago, Hong Kong's financial district was paralyzed for three months from protests calling for greater political rights. But Orient Capital's Andrew Collier says those protests were just as much about economic rights.

COLLIER: The people doing Occupy didn't explicitly 12 say it was about economic issues. But if you talk to them, they are definitely feeling threatened economically. And I think if their attitude is, if we don't have the vote, and we don't have access to the economic system the way we used to, then we have nothing to lose.

SCHMITZ: But that's not the attitude of William Hon, the trader who grew up in Hong Kong. He's focused on improving his Mandarin.

HON: In the future, I can foresee that more and more Chinese clients are coming over to us or to other banks. So I have to adapt to this - so improving the Mandarin, adapting to Chinese culture, you know, to talk to them and get more business.

SCHMITZ: Hon says he'll never change his political beliefs, but when it comes to business, if you can't beat them, join them. Rob Schmitz, NPR News, Hong Kong.