ANXIETY MOUNTS IN HONG KONG AS DEADLINE PASSES FOR PASSPORTS.

Byline: Edward A. Gargan The New York Times

Inexorably, the clock marched toward midnight, and the last chance to apply for a British overseas passport.

Then, a few minutes into this morning, a phalanx of blue-uniformed police pushed toward the doors of the black marble-and-glass Immigration Tower, a tiny woman, barely visible in their midst, clutching a white paper application.

Yau Sui-chun, who will turn 62 this month, was the last of the 54,178 Hong Kong residents to file for status Sunday as British overseas citizens by the formal midnight deadline.

As she pushed her application across a plain wood table under the glare of television lights, she ended a final week of mounting clamor by more than 100,000 Hong Kong residents to register as citizens of a British Dependent Territory. Each day, for the past week, tens of thousands of people, anxious over China's increasing intrusions into Hong Kong's affairs, camped in the rain, stood in interminable lines, engaged in brief scuffles over line-jumping, all to sign up for this tenuous sort of British identity - an identity they hope will provide some security after China retakes this colony July 1, 1997.

``This is the best we can hope for,'' said Billy Lai, who joined the line early Sunday, as he took the application form from a blue-uniformed immigration officer. ``Much better than a Chinese passport.''

The British National Overseas passport, while not conferring British citizenship, does allow residents of British and former British territories to travel without a visa to Britain and about 80 other countries.

As for the new ``Special Administrative Region'' passport that will be issued here by China next year, only Britain and Singapore have so far agreed to grant visa-free entry to its holders.

Already about half of Hong Kong's 6.2 million residents are, by virtue of birth, eligible for British overseas passports. Those flowing into immigration offices Sunday were among the 2 million Hong Kong residents who were not born here, mostly immigrants from China, and were clutching at the last opportunity for a semblance of British identity.

Those who waited here for hours were not Hong Kong's power-brokers, but its bus and taxi drivers, clerks and secretaries, vegetable sellers and waiters, plumbers, electricians and road workers. They never attended Oxford or Harvard or Berkeley. They do not hold British, Canadian or American passports, nor have they purchased citizenship from Mauritius or other small countries that offer passports for a price. Their fates remain here.

``People are afraid of China,'' said one young woman in a black T-shirt, who would only give her name as Miss Yip, moments after emerging from the immigration shortly before midnight Sunday.

``Maybe the SAR passport is not so useful,'' she said as she smoked a cigarette, referring to the Chinese papers. ``Maybe some countries don't accept it.''