Rear Window | Four days in Beijing

Severo Portela

It is understandable that we would take Chief Executive Chui Sai On’s early December visit to Beijing to be nothing more than routine, although highly formal, utterly political, and not only because the highlight is an audience with President Xi Jinping. The CE’s political agenda is year after year more or less the same. Besides the audience with the President, Chui Sai On is supposed to make a presentation of the 2017 work report, as well as present the MSAR guidelines for 2018, followed by a certain number of meetings with Central Government departments.

Also understandable, is the fact that the public information coming from the audience and the meetings with the PRC government agencies or departments is formal and scant, this way putting down or delaying any guessing games back in Macau at the SAR level. In the coming 2018 year we will be able to have a much more educated guess as to what names the local lingo puts to the “north winds” blowing over the tiny MSAR. There may be conflicting signs causing concern about the particular special substance that creates the fabric of the special administrative region that brings a sense of being in control.

Macau seems to be played by two opposing forces: inside, there is a trend to deconstruct pieces of legislation, by erasing old stuff or by adding new stuff; at the extreme, regulatory micromanagement will challenge the whole of the system, creating a Swiss cheese; externally, there is a comprehensive option to join bigger realities, bigger projects, larger horizons that one way or another dwarfs MSAR:  Hengqin first, today the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Great Bay Area, tomorrow – if Macau is to find a role – the Belt and Road initiative.

Under the China National Tourism Administration, Macau takes part in a new organization, a federation, indeed, of nine cities in the Guangdong Province – Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Huizhou, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Jiamen, Zhaoqin – and the two SARs. The federation is to promote joint branding and market sharing, among other elements, to forge a world-class travel destination. CNTA Li Yaying believes that tourism is changing and that a new era of holistic tourism development has arrived!

There is nothing wrong in looking for opportunities out of the Macau box; no problem to abide by the mantra of diversification; or jump onto the wagon of integration.

What seems, if not wrong, plainly regrettable is the weakening of the rule law, in a general sense, of which lawmaker Sulu Sou’s suspension is an example of a wrong move, soon to be proven to be a little too problematic to be just the cost of red tape in the development of the Macau Special Administrative Region. What seems odd, if not threatening, is the decision to freeze Ng Kuok Cheong’s tabling of a discussion to replace the Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau (thus fulfilling the Basic Law) on grounds that allegedly NPC Zhang Rongshan had already advised that the proposal without elections followed the Basic Law. Take this as a precedent, and fear.

January, 2018 will begin with the case of Legislator Sulu Sou together with former president of the New Macau Association Scott Chiang scheduled to start on the ninth at the Court of First Instance. They answer to aggravated disobedience to police agents – more or less for having walked in the middle of the road instead of the boardwalk! Sulu Sou, who managed to attain lyrical brilliance with his innocuous paper plane-throwing antics, seems to be in dire straits to find a lawyer.