Kapok: Drawing the line

Eric Sautedé

I must admit it is often tricky to “draw the line between academic research, political commentary and direct political intervention”—to quote my former employer, and for sure, the easiest way to draw that line is to make sure that there can be no conflict between these three forms of endeavor by just eliminating the first one, even though your mission is precisely to make sure that everything academic is protected under your watch.
If you don’t write about politics from an academic perspective, then there are few chances that you will be sought after to provide political commentary and for sure any “direct political intervention” will be seen as “just” the act of any citizen, unless you become yourself an “activist”, that it is to say a recognized figure of a political movement.
Many questions arise from that “easiest” path: is it worthy of a university to let go of sophistication and decide that all intellectual undertakings should be governed by the most basic law of electricity of “on or off”, depending on the circumstances? Is it even effective in the short-term and can the expected trade-off, set at a few tens of millions, be “safely” secured? Is it sustainable in terms of image and standing in the community, and if yes, how so? From a moral standpoint, the “easiest” path is plain wrong because the end justifies the means, but then, even from a practical and almost cynical angle, what are the actual benefits going to be?
Now, regarding my own “convictions”. I know no political scientist who is not a democrat at heart. How can one studying “power in a social context” and deciphering the best forms of government be in favor of totalitarianism or even authoritarianism given our dark and traumatizing twentieth century? And even if we let go of the old categories, everybody knows, even the highest officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the dangers of plutocracy—the government of, by and for the wealthiest—and kleptocracy—the government of confiscators/thieves. Why would Xi Jinping engage in such a wide-sweeping campaign to fight corruption if that was not the case? Why would close to 200 members of the Central Committee of the CCP, including a few from the elite Politburo, fall for good because of that new operation to catch “flies as well as tigers”?
Sure thing, “democracy” is not as popular as it used to be in the People’s Republic, say up to March 2012 when then Premier Wen Jiabao emotionally spoke about the need for political reform following democratic imperatives.
In fact, democracy seems pretty much the target of the “Seven Speak-Nots” defined in May 2013 as the taboo subjects that should not be discussed openly in the press or by academic circles (universal values, civil society, citizen rights, judicial independence, freedom of the press, past mistakes of the communist party, and the privileged capitalist class). Should that affect Macao? Is there any Communist party in need of restructuring in Macao? Is there a party that does not want to see its capacity to rule affected by an unquestionably weakening drive to uproot corruption in its own ranks?
Being a democrat at heart does not mean that one does not know the shortcomings of democracy, especially when it comes to “efficiency” and the claim of representativeness—disenchantment arises as much in “archaeodemocracies” as in “neodemocracies”. But then, one of the things I argue in my latest “academic” paper is that the corporatist outlook of Macao’s political system inherited from the 1980s, despite or because of the liberal context, has become fairly frustrating for a locally engaged, more affluent, more professional and better-educated youth that can but all too easily blame outdated and unsuitable intermediation bodies for all the inadequate public policies catering only for segmented parts of the community. That cost me my job.