Kapok | Unsophisticated zealots

Eric Sautedé

Some people never fail to disappoint you, or rather to meet your expectations as being the least principled human beings there are.

Former dancers incapable of uttering three sentences with the slightest sense of community-oriented interest will dress up like juvenile Chinese Communist Youth League or even communists martyrs in Jinggangshan to put a show on what it means to be a patriot.

The fact that many people in both Hong Kong and Macao came as political refugees escaping the horrors of the Great Leap Forward or the Great Cultural Revolution seems to have been forgotten (always remember that when it is “Great”, it is most probably equally destructive, especially with “Great Leaders”!), thus showing that historical memory in the low forehead of ill-intentioned individuals will never perform what it is supposed to achieve, that is to prevent — at least try to — the most hideous self-inflicted man-made tragedies.

To these patriots I say: give up your foreign passport and move to the first system; stop praising the first one while enjoying the benefits of the second whose guarantee depends on people you keep insulting (or suspending)!

Legislator Mak Soi-kun belongs to this group of unsophisticated zealots who would simply be laughable if they were not dangerous. Oh! mocking we still do, just like when Mr Mak suggested last December that the reasons presiding over the  destruction brought forth by Typhoon Hato could be found in the absence of patriotic sentiment displayed by the administrators in charge of the Weather Bureau! Even his usual partners in zealotry could not support him this time, and he had to concede defeat when his motion to push for more “patriotic education” among civil servants was turned down.

This is the kind of ridiculous claim that gives the people of Jiangmen 江門, the folk group supporting Mr Mak and his simpleton second in command, Zheng Anting, its nickname of Gangmen 肛門, meaning “anus” — an homophonic pun in Cantonese. This became an online meme on social media during the massive May 2014 protests against the government, when members of the Macao Jiangmen Communal Society were herded to take part in the unique yet sparse procession supporting the government. When interviewed by TDM at the time, most of the rather elderly participants admitted not being aware as to why they were taking part in the walk.

To be honest, this is not fair to Jiangmen, as it is the one place in Guangdong that provided a lot of courageous Chinese emigrant workers who built the railroads in the US, for example. Jiangmen was itself an open city to international trade starting in the early years of the 20th century. Kaiping, the UNESCO heritage site of the dialou, is a county that is part of Jiangmen, and testifies to a unique form of rural globalization. It is said that 100,000 people in Macao can trace their ancestry to Jiangmen, and I wonder how they actually feel about such ridiculous assertions.

And then, this week Mr Mak followed up on his “patriotic” obsession, claiming that one of the main reasons why the youth in Macao was not able to properly embrace its “love for Macao and for the motherland” had to do with the lack of proper markings alluding to the People’s Republic of China, hence his proposal to add such a reference to the ID card of every citizen — the first administrative document a teenager will have in his or her possession!

When it was still possible to conduct independent surveys in Macao, then professor Bill Chou was able to show that the usually assumed patriotic nature of Macao society was most probably an overstatement whose survival depended on Chinese language newspapers filled with patriotic rhetoric and richly- endowed traditional and communal associations.

Why the need to move to a post-2049 reference in 2018 then? Is the Macao youth in line with the one in Hong Kong who majoritarily supports independence? Is it an identity problem or the growing sense of an educated civil society that not all aspects of an authoritarian regime are worth espousing?