Kowloon: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2014. cv, 411 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$38.00, paper. ISBN 978-962-937-207-1.
This edited volume of eighteen essays could not have come at a better time than 2014, which marked the fifteenth anniversary of the establishment of the Macao Special Administrative Region (MSAR), as well as the first decade of Vegas-style entertainment entering Macao. The eighteen essays, containing much useful and updated data, treat an array of post-handover issues and phenomena pertaining to vital domains wherein Macao, as a unique city under the framework of “One Country, Two Systems,” grows and morphs; topics explored are grouped into, namely, 1) legal and political dimensions; 2) socio-economic dimensions; 3) identity, education, and cultural dimensions; and 4) external links.
Preluding the volume’s interdisciplinary discussion are two overviews by Zhiliang Wu (xxxv–liv) and Jorge Rangel (lv–lxii), who offer their analytical observations of post-handover Macao from local Chinese and Luso-Macanese perspectives, respectively. The overviews are immediately followed by Ming Chan’s historical sketch (lxiii–cv), which outlines Macao’s recent changes and developments through examining Luso legacies in Macao as well as post-colonial changes, breakthroughs, and readjustments in the MSAR.
Part 1 contains four essays that focus on legal and political matters.
In chapter 1, Herbert Yee evaluates the implementation of “One Country, Two Systems” in the MSAR and argues that “the trend of ‘mainlandization”’ (4) could jeopardise the city’s future development. Bill Chou demonstrates in chapter 2 how the MSAR government has been negatively impacted by inadequate autonomy, inadequate representativeness, and inadequate civic participation. In chapter 3, Jorge Godinho assesses the representativeness and legitimacy of chief executive and legislature elections. Asking a similar question of legitimacy and representativeness, Bruce Kwong in chapter 4 reviews the 2009 chief executive election. The essays in this part share a collective hope that a higher degree of public involvement in electoral procedures will be beneficial to the MSAR political landscape.
The three essays in part 2 analyse Macao’s transformation from a socio-economical perspective. In chapter 5, Sonny Lo looks at the city’s casino capitalism and examines the implications of its impact on Macao’s society, politics, and economy. Ricardo Siu and Miao He conduct a case study of VIP gambling rooms in Macao in chapter 6, in which they offer a comparative analysis of the Macao gambling room model and the Las Vegas casino resort model, and investigate the potential, obstacles, and tensions of integrating the two models. In chapter 7, Eilo Yu, Emma Lao, and Duncan Cheong paint a scenario of e-politics in Macao by presenting analytical readings of how young people, including university students, engage themselves in cyber politics and how such online platforms have enabled and promoted a continuous growth of a new socio-political voice in Macao.
Part 3 houses five essays that look at Macao’s culture, identity, and education. Jean Berlie studies in chapter 8 the identity of Macao Chinese by making reference to aspects including language use, social problems, and association membership. In chapter 9, Malte Kaeding offers an interesting analysis of how the Macao identity has been and continues to be formed by looking into the cultural identities and civic identity present in the city, and by identifying and interpreting indicators for a Macao identity. In chapter 10, Benson Wong, while addressing issues pertaining to education reform, argues that teacher professionalism in Macao is essentially a political matter and that Macao and Hong Kong share a few factors leading to the underdevelopment of teacher professionalism. Hayes Tang in chapter 11 evaluates the ecology of higher education in Macao and expresses concern for the phenomenon of academic capitalism in Macao that will likely threaten academic autonomy and hamper positive advancement of skills and the quality of the city’s workforce. Through reviewing four heritage dispute cases—the municipal market of S. Lourenço, the Social Welfare Bureau building (affectionately known as laam ook jaai 藍屋仔, or “the blue house”), the Guia Lighthouse, and the Mong Ha Military Barracks, Derrick Tam evaluates in chapter 12 the negotiating forces of heritage production, tourism, and urban planning in Macao.
The three essays in the eclectic part 4 present different types of external links Macao has. José Matias presents in chapter 13 how Macao has developed into a hub that bridges China and Portuguese-speaking countries. In chapter 14, Minxing Zhao examines how the case of Macao’s Banco Delta Asia, a bank blacklisted by the US Treasury Department in 2005 for “its alleged involvements in facilitating North Korea’s illicit financial activities” (365), was only an isolated event which really played to the US’s foreign policy objectives. In chapter 15, Cathryn Clayton looks at three types of internationalisation, namely, making globality, making locality, and globalising the local, in an attempt to venture a description of a/the local identity in post-colonial Macao.
This collection of essays makes a valuable contribution to the study of contemporary Macao as well as modern China. The chapters are appropriately dialogical and balanced in terms of perspectives, although, if the reviewer may, the inclusion of a discussion of Macao’s increasingly vibrant performing arts scene and creative industry would have made the volume even more comprehensive. This reviewer would not hesitate to recommend China’s Macao Transformed to students and researchers who wish to have an organic understanding of China’s “One Country, Two Systems.”
Katrine K. Wong
University of Macau, Macao SAR, China
pp. 892-894