Leanda Lee
This week the Bridge opens and the head of the Macau Liaison Office dies: the first was to fanfare – long awaited and yet abruptly – and the other accompanied by astonishing reticence, even silence.
The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge was inaugurated by President Xi Jinping on Tuesday 23rd and opened to traffic on Wednesday 24th. Originally expected to be in the officiating party, Zheng Xiaosong was dead.
The region celebrated the building of a bridge which “should strengthen the Greater Bay Area and promoted economic development”. This is a bridge to which 20 workers had been sacrificed in workplace fatalities and 500 left with injuries. This is a bridge which disturbed the habitat of a singular species of life, the Chinese White Dolphin, colloquially known as the pink dolphin, which dropped in numbers from 80 to 67 in 6 years during the construction.
In the same week, a man holding a position often described as more powerful than the Chief Executive, dies with hardly a fitting eulogy. He was a man raised to a role of responsibility, essential to the local political machinery, a man in a lauded position who, we have been told, could not bear his own existence. And this, not a week out from the opening of a structure completely symbolic of the entire rational for his position – the liaison office is an integral part of the economic, political and cultural unification of China, Hong Kong and Macau.
A man of such discipline to have climbed the tortuous rungs of the officialdom ladder, shown determination to achieve qualifications from Oslo (in Norwegian for goodness sake!) and Oxford (in international diplomacy) was said – according to Beijing’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office – to have committed suicide. The implication was that it was his depressive state that lead him there, although no-one in contact with Zheng recently noted anything which would indicate that diagnosis.
According to an organisation founded by a previous Premier of the State of Victoria to raise awareness and remove the stigma of depression, no-one is immune from the ravages of the Black Dog. However, it is also true that the more meaningful one’s role in life, the less devastating the effects of some types of depression. Surely this man was reaching the pinnacle of his career. Surely his position as pivotal to the integration of Macau back to the bosom of the motherland was a profound one. Surely, if he exhibited signs of depression, the “mother” failed in her duty of care, even as she re-attaches the umbilical cord (as the bridge was described by Hong Kong’s democratic politician, Claudia Mo). Were the shadows of earlier goings-on in the liaison office or the pressures applied by Macau’s omnipresent plutocracy too great to bear?
I do not see this as a joyous week worthy of celebration: not for the engineering feat; not for the project management; not for the promise of forging economic links between the three regions with political overtones. I see this inauguration in juxtaposition against the almost-headline case of a man (and the 20 other men and ecologies) who died an ignominious death – by whatever forces brought him down – whilst in the service of his country. A death brushed under the carpet, a life and professional history left uncelebrated, a human story not told.
Zheng Xiaosong was another cog in the machine, another rivet in that over-reach of a bridge that was presented as a demonstration of “the successful implementation of the ‘one country, two systems’ principle”.
In this celebration of technical achievement for future economic gain we saw a disregard for the enormity of human experience, where development, innovation and success were distilled to but one arbitrary realm of human existence, the economic. Wherefore ecological, spiritual, social, or cultural endeavours? Wherefore our humanity in the search for “development”?
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