Rear Window | Contrasting tendencies

Severo Portela

Despite the almost negligible cash-flow retreat, these days of the heavy showering of bills from the 45 Casinos’ Golden Week seems not enough to brighten up the concerned mood among Macau People – pardon us the abuse of the collective term.

As in any developing narrative around the power of the coincidence, we have to retrospectively spot the early steps of the walk of the Macau system (ditto second) towards today’s more frequent commentary of being closer to the mainland China system (usually referred to as the first system). As a very important and dutiful job to perform, we would risk a puerile I told you so but for the main objective of this column.

We would rather keep abreast of the ongoing issues, looking to a changing landscape, if not an altered state. And we have to admit that either willingly or unwillingly, the president of MSAR´s Legislative Assembly, Ho Iat Seng, was the catalyst that led broad sectors of the population to consider the restructuring in the executive, legislative and judicial levels.

Actually, Ho Iat Seng, regardless of the political heavyweight label he wears as a member of a local family elite and high ranking NPC member, cannot disclaim crossing the line of poor performance, misuse of power and to have been running a Legislative Assembly more prone to rubber stamping than scrutinizing government activity…according to the Basic Law.

Suddenly, last summer Ho Iat Seng decided to dismiss, as he rightfully could, top Legislative Assembly jurists before retirement age on the grounds of a restructuring of the legal experts’ department. From that point on, clumsily though but true to the stated restructuring of the judicial and the judiciary, the Legislative Assembly president and the not-yet-assumed candidate for the Chief Executive role came to deny one of the differentiating and well-deserved technical qualities of both legal experts: the reading of the Basic Law. Apparently, Ho Iat Seng takes their said expertise as second-rate as the original mini-constitution of the Macau Special Administrative Region was drafted in Chinese…therefore only Chinese legal experts could read the Basic Law. Legislator Pereira Coutinho told Farah Master from Reuters that both jurists have for the past few years internally criticized some of the government bills because they breached the Basic Law. We would add that this is an either/or problem: either we care about bills breaching the Basic Law or we remove whoever says the bills breach the Basic Law. We see bad things around or, to be elegant, we call upon Yeats: things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

This should not blind us to the fact that the judicial blitzkrieg, of which lawmaker Sulu Sou’s ordeal was a test case, is felt as utterly undeserved by Macau people as they look across the Pearl River Delta to Hong Kong. The source, rather the second source, of the playwright’s twist on Macau seems to not take into account the concept of elite (if not a mock one, an empty one). The elite, as the alfa and the omega of the system, only breeds discontent and restricts room for criticism…and the space of the very category of “elite”. Does elite mean conformity?