Insight | Macau: The state of affairs

Paulo Barbosa

The city is swarmed with roadworks and many more new projects will be built in the foreseeable future. As a result, Macau has become a construction site, uglier and more crowded than before. With a few exceptions, most of the ongoing works don’t bring any visible benefit. Imitative bad taste typical of the noveau riche types prevails.

In the midst of the chaos, it is hard to see a discernible plan for the future of Macau. If there is any model being implemented, it is one that considers much more welfare of the local elites than that of the average citizen. It is a capitalist model replicated and made wicked by Chinese developers. Just look at the countless cities that sprang forth like mushrooms in China, into which millions of rural citizens were moved. These are grey cities, unpleasant and non-organic, planned sometimes from scratch by governmental committees.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. But that’s how the new part of Macau is being planned, without any relation to centuries of urban heritage.

The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) predictions that Macau will become “the richest place in the world” by 2020 are perceived by many here as a joke or an example of inequality. How can that be right if often we see elderly citizens and low-paid migrant workers scavenging through the garbage?

Residents may be subsidized, but face an ever-increasing cost of living. The old timers don’t feel they can identify with the city under construction. Macau has, since the beginning of its history, been a small place. It has a certain scale that is not being respected. The drive behind that is perhaps property speculation. Fortunes are made when a contract is inked, a land concession results in instant millionaires.

What is there on the table for the common citizen, who lacks the “guanxi” and financial resources to accede to such profitable operations? In some cases, a modern version of enslavement. In this profit-driven environment – which has its zenith in Hong Kong – the cost of living often becomes unbearable. Regarding housing, it is well-known that families have to pay too much to live in the fashionable new tenements. They all look the same with exotic names, doormen, a pitiful gymnasium, a cinema room and bowling. The average-earning persons that end up in places like that, sometimes moved by a status aspiration, risk being indebted for life, given their bloated mortgages.

Not a long time ago, Macau was not like this. People who needed or preferred to live on the cheap had options to do so. Ten years ago, a small two-room flat in downtown Macau could cost as little as MOP3,000. But now, the system is creating many pitfalls for the younger generations, leading them to unsustainable trends.

All the above-mentioned factors are framed by a conformist mentality. People do what they are told to do. Individualism and critical thinking are often rebuffed. Instead of solving problems, the government repeatedly states that everything is alright and that the youth has reasons to smile. Meanwhile, it approves authoritarian and unnecessary laws.

With the cashflow generated by the casinos, that so much impresses the IMF, Macau had a unique opportunity to become an example of urban quality of life for the whole world. Instead, the option was to build more artificial islands where thousands will live like packed sardines. 

Some people here believe that Macau could become what the IMF believes it is. They are being defrauded.