E lizabeth Tang is a woman at the center of what could be a perfect political storm.

If things go well and protests are peaceful during the World Trade Organization's gathering in Hong Kong in December, Tang will deserve much of the credit. A long-standing activist, as head of the Hong Kong People's Alliance on the WTO she has taken on the job of coordinating the thousands of anti-globalization protesters expected to storm the pro-business bastion of Hong Kong for the WTO meeting.

But if things go the way of Seattle in 1999 and Cancun in 2001, with protesters again becoming unruly during a WTO meeting, Tang could be blamed as the most visible protest leader in a city that prides itself on promoting social harmony and keeping the rowdy at bay.

Sitting 19 floors above the bustling streets of Mong Kok, Tang, 48, stays busy, as she has through almost thirty years of being a political activist here.

She leafs through a stack of press reports that highlight the territory's official preparations for December. Violence expected. Activists may be blacklisted. Investors warned.

For her, it is as if it is 1967 again and the government fears the return of riots sparked by laborers inflamed with the passions of the Cultural Revolution. Only this time the expected assault is from foreign agitators trying to disrupt globalization. She says the government is missing the point. "I think I'm just trying to mend, here and there, all the broken pieces. It's nothing close to social change.

"It seems the government is not considering the impact [of globalization] on people's livelihood, on the environment and employment," says Tang, who is also a founder and director of the Confederation of Trade Unions, which represents 170,000 workers.

The pro-democracy CTU brings dozens of unions under its umbrella to seek compensation for accident victims, agitate for minimum wage laws and maximum working hours and provide education on labor and contract rights.

Tang says the government puts too much emphasis on the "positive" spin of globalization and not enough on how free trade may negatively effect the domestic economy.

"I don't blame the WTO, I blame our governmen because our government is more aggressive than the WTO in terms of liberalizing trade and services," she says.

Tang's message is emotional and a tough sell in a territory famous for lifting living standards for generations of poor immigrants through hard work and largely unrestricted capitalism.

If anything, the SAR's prosperity is a testament to the benefits of trade, minimal regulation and small government, but Tang says it has been built on the backs of the poor, with not enough credit given to them.

"Very simple people have created the wealth in Hong Kong," she says. "It's not just [tycoon] Li Ka-shing, but a lot of common people."

Her own humble origins are the reason she keeps fighting for the poor, she says. Born here, she grew up poor, the second of three children.

Tang remembers her illiterate mother helping to operate her father's quilt-making shop in Tseun Mun. Tang studied at Polytechnic University and while there had an awakening - the territory was filled with industrial workers without a voice. She would help them organize to foment social change.

Her upbringing helped mold her future as a pro-democracy activist, she says. It was a tough task, considering that her father hated the Chinese Communist Party and associated labor unions and worker advocacy with the kind of politics that took over China in 1949.

Like so many millions of others, her father fled the revolution. He moved here when he was barely out of his teens. She was born in 1957.

Tang works seven days a week organizing workshops that teach about free trade, and promoting the right of people to contest policies that damage the livelihood of workers and their families.

With the WTO ministerial meeting due to grab center stage in just under two months, Tang is firmly in the center of the action. She is a constant in the news, pressing the government for details on how protesters will be treated and warning failure to provide for dissent could spell trouble.

She is a thorn in the side of Commerce Secretary John Tsang, who will chair the December meeting, as she insists the government has failed to talk openly with the protest community.

Last weekend, she was on a panel debating the merits of the WTO with Tsang, and WTO director-general Pascal Lamy. At the meeting, attended by 70 activists who briefly swarmed over Lamy's car as he was leaving, she insisted the WTO should be abolished.

Some say her message is simplistic and she and other anti-WTO protesters miss the point.

Andrew Work, director of the Lion Rock Institute, which claims to fight "creeping socialism" in Hong Kong, also attended the forum. He decried what he says are peasants and workers in the anti-WTO movement claiming to be poor but who are really conscripts of protectionist unions and governments.

"[These are] rich-country unions and rich-country farmers ganging up to keep Third World farmers out of Korea," Work said, citing the Korean Peasant League, an organization of rice farmers that is a security concern during the WTO gathering.

He urged WTO officials not to give in to demands from such groups.

Tang does not take these comments lightly. She says her main purpose is to raise awareness about the effects of globalization, not bust up the WTO, even though there are many different agendas among the anticipated 10,000 dissenters expected.

"We want to look beyond free trade," she says, to work for the rights of workers, something that is not within the mandate of the WTO.

But Henry Gao, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, warned Tang and groups of vocal Filipino peasants and Indonesian migrant workers at the forum it does not pay to "shoot the messenger."

"Hong Kong's comparative advantage is in services, and its service providers are most of the time more efficient than service providers in other countries," he says.

"People here do not have much to worry about in terms of the WTO."

The government also says the concerns of Tang and her allies are misplaced.

"None of Hong Kong's existing services commitments [under the WTO] would commit Hong Kong to introduce any new liberalization measures that would, in turn, affect local employment," says WTO information officer Jonathan Chong.

In many ways it is a dialogue of the deaf, with Tang and her alliance seeing globalization as a threat, even to one of the world's most globalized territories, while business leaders, government officials and most economists say free trade has benefited the poor.

"Globally, trade facilitates the more efficient allocation of resources and increases overall welfare gains," Lamy said last Sunday to protesters waiting to unfurl banners calling for an end to the WTO.

"The evidence is overwhelming that nations which are open enjoy higher economic growth and levels of development than those that are closed. And it is an irrefutable truth that no poor nation has ever become rich without trade,"

Tang's position on the issue, she says, is a natural result of her social activism of the late 1970s.

"I have a strong commitment to make sure people don't get treated unfairly," she says.

In 1978, while at university, she became a volunteer for the Catholic Student Association, a job that exposed her to the plight of thousands of Yau Ma Tei boat people who lost their jobs to over-fishing and development. The water they lived on then is now the several hundred hectares of the West Kowloon reclamation.

While tutoring the children of the boat dwellers, she learned the government would not give them housing because they had never lived on land.

"They were neglected. Nobody was aware of their existence," she says.

Apo Leong, who works for the Asia Monitor Resource Center, protested with Tang during the relocation fight in 1978.

He says two things make Tang a fighter for justice - her spunky personality and unending commitment to "the people's movement."

"She was very articulate," and eager to help others by taking risks, says Leong, noting that students nowadays base their actions on more selfish reasons.

Back then, facing police action and the risk of being labeled a pariah, Tang just wanted to see justice served.

In the end, the activists won and the former boat people were given access to public housing in Tuen Mun.

After Tang graduated from Polytechnic in 1982, she conducted courses on human rights for blue-collar workers through the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee.

While working for the committee, she met her husband, legislator Lee Cheuk-yan, the CTU general secretary and one of the main organizers of the July 1, 2003, protest march.

With Lee, Leong and a friend, Annie Lok, Tang became a labor activist and helped form the CTU in 1990, which became a pillar of the democracy movement and an alternative to the more conservative, pro-Beijing Federation of Trade Unions.

She has been its director for 15 years.

At home, away from the media pressure that has become routine, Tang is relaxed, her sense of humor intact.

How does she keep going? The secret is the work, she says.

"If you work hard for the trade unions, you will look young."