London: Routledge, 2020. 156 pp. (Illustrations.) US$160, cloth. ISBN 9780367339708.
One of the major misconceptions about Macau—the great Asian casinopolis—is that its people are politically apathetic. Far from it, Macau was settled by strong people with strong personalities, from Portuguese hidalgos to the refugees of China’s fallen dynasties. It was even hometown to Sun Yat-sen: the man who ended that dynastic cycle and founded the Chinese republic. Nonetheless, that misconception has led to less outside interest in local events, including episodes of dissent, unrest, and collective action.
Fortunately, Meng U Ieong, a political scientist at the University of Macau, has compiled a text that challenges that narrative with facts from the ground. It arrives at an important time, when Beijing’s crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong—the PRC’s other world-facing special administrative region—has reached a critical stage.
This edited volume explores aspects of Macau’s reconstitution within the PRC. It includes eight chapters grouped into three parts, although the boundaries of that tripartite subdivision are not always clear cut. The common thread through six of the eight chapters is protest and policing.
The outlying chapters are 1 and 3, which consider international and comparative perspectives. Chapter 1 compares the gaming policies adopted by Macau and Singapore between 2000 and 2020. Whereas Singapore introduced gaming as an economic subsector, the Macau government went all-in. This reflects the different financial and spatial attributes of the two cities, and Edmund Loi keenly observes the resulting impacts: from Singapore’s development of more family-friendly resorts to Macau’s courting of high-rollers. Meanwhile, Matias dos Santos’s chapter 3 illustrates Beijing’s vision of Macau. It demonstrates how the PRC leverages Macau’s colonial past as a diplomatic tool to promote Macau as the focal point of a Beijing-led multilateral forum of Portuguese-speaking countries as well as a hub in Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. Portugal, for its part, seems content with such airs.
Most of the remaining essays regard protest. Ironically, while Beijing uses the colonial past as diplomatic capital, the Macau government erases its physical manifestations. Lei Chin Pang’s chapter 2 powerfully laments the local government’s sacrifice of ancient spaces in pursuit of gaudy overdevelopment. What’s left of historic Macau—the fateful enclave that served as the primary nexus between Europe and Asia for almost 300 years—now requires an expert to trace. Lei recalls how such carelessness led to a robust conservation movement that won the privileges provided by designation as a UNESCO world heritage site. He aptly recognizes that Macau’s unique history might be the catalyst capable of framing that long-elusive sense of local identity. Macau could stake a credible claim to being an eternal city, if only its leaders would choose to balance the venerable with the vulgar.
In chapter 4, Lin Zhongxuan shares his personal observations of four local demonstrations, characterizing them into a “playful” and “resentful” dichotomy. He asserts that the organizers of grassroots livelihood protests (say, regarding phone-rate increases) tend to use more positive iconography to attract participants than those demanding transparency in public finance. Even if true, the comparison rings superficial without placing those repertoires in context: one-off events, on the one hand, versus a generational battle against corruption on the other.
Chapter 5, by Ieong and Lio Chi Fai, turns our attention toward labour protests: Macau’s most prevalent type. This work is the empirical highlight of the collection, drawing conclusions from a dataset of 554 demonstrations that occurred between 2000 and 2017. Correlating the frequency of these incidents to the pace and character of labour organization proliferation, they record how the Macau government ultimately resolved to tighten the registration requirements for new organizations, thereby assuming greater control of their political voice.
The remaining chapters make important contributions as well. Chapter 6 by Lawrence Ho Ka-ki and Agnes Lam Lok-Fong provides an overview of the structure of Macau’s police forces, detailing early efforts to upgrade capacities and enhance cooperation across sprawling bureaucracies. In chapter 7, Ieong and Wang Hongyu present another empirical study on how media choices influenced popular perceptions of the Umbrella Movement among Macau’s college students. Finally, Chan Wai-Yin and Edmund Cheng Wai apply historical institutionalism to explain divergent developments in Macau and Hong Kong following the watershed Cultural Revolution era riots that seized both cities in the 1960s.
Given the pace of recent events vis-à-vis the speed of academic publishing, it is not surprising that this work already needs to be updated. That is unavoidable. Yet, some of the chapters are impacted more than others. Chapter 6, for example, does not cite any developments in local police reform post-2014, even though the years between 2014 and 2019 demonstrated the transformation of the Hong Kong police force into a paramilitary organization. Chapter 7 also begs for a follow-up because most of the liberal media that Macau people had access to in 2014 (i.e., Apple Daily, Stand News, Macau Concealers) have since been shut down by the regime.
Yet, on the whole, the text provides a valuable collation of relevant information for sociologists and important context for the legal researcher. Students should be indebted as well, for its shortcomings suggest directions for future research. One lasting impression shines through: that Macau’s protest culture between 2000 and 2020 was ongoing but more narrowly issue-oriented than Hong Kong’s, leading to smaller demonstrations and easier policing repertoires.
The apathy misconception probably arose from Macau achieving a sustained period of wealth at the same time its media and academia came under the political dominion of the PRC. Material prosperity in exchange for obedience was the post-handover social contract, quietly enforced by Beijing’s ability to dissolve Macau’s gaming monopoly. The patterns recorded here seem unlikely to reoccur anytime soon, given Beijing’s recent imposition of draconian national security laws and disqualification of local democratic candidates, pushing dissent further underground. Nevertheless, the evidence presented here makes a strong case that the Macau people are not politically apathetic, just politically latent.
Jason Buhi
Barry University, Andreas School of Law, Orlando