Rear Window | Lotus vs Bauhinia

Severo Portela

Apparently, the opening schedule of the bridge over the Pearl River Delta has been compromised by a set of defective pillars, thus delaying the long dreamed connectivity between the SARs of Macau and Hong Kong. This slowdown could be cast as metaphor of the drifting course Macau and its sister SAR seem to be on these days: a soft adjustment to the right margin and hard adjustment on the left bank.
In Macau, the adjustment process in the gaming sector is going further up – or down depending on the perspective – and the pace seems to be mandatory. Casino revenue declined during the golden week by an average of 20pct, despite the number of visitors increasing by 4.3pct, as highlighted by Nomura’s gaming analyst, Richard Huang, quoted by Bloomberg: “The growing number of tourists as well as high hotel occupancy rate don´t directly lead to the improvement of gambling revenue, as the visitation growth is mainly driven by tourists with weaker spending power.” Hong Kong registered a drop of 12pct in the same period.
This is the soft adjustment. Not only could Macau do without Central Government special support policy (should the MSAR register a fall in arrivals as was announced back in January by the head of the Liaison Office, Li Gang), but it also managed to keep the slump under the unofficial forecast. The numbers are going down as the drive of the anti-corruption mood goes up and China´s GDP growth slows. Anything out of this frame, like the positive outlooks for the market based on wishful thinking, is voodoo economics. Doctor Pangloss would be viewed by the Macau prediction industry as an unrepentant pessimist.
So, again, this is soft adjustment. Government revenues from the casino industry will become less and less, such that spending will no longer be a matter of chance and will become a matter of choice. We do have to build a vanity fire and some window dressing to show the world a happy “ville radieuse,” don’t we?
Now we travel east over the PRD to Hong Kong and its brand of adjustment… the rough one. As the number of visitors from the mainland has been solidly decreasing since the Umbrella Movement, retail sales overall declined 3.7pct. From the hardest-hit jewelry and luxury gifts houses to the humblest of the food stalls in Mong Kok. It was in vibrant Mong Kok that officials trying to clear the area of CNY illegal traders clashed with fish ball hawkers. The clashes were upgraded to riots – some believe them to be the worst since the Star Ferry riots of the 60s – because of the fueling “localist” Hong Kong indigenous brought via social media to the battlefield around Langham Place. Ironically, this is the spot – 555 Shanghai Street Mong Kong – where we can see the amazing statue of the Two Jiang, one holding a Red Book the other a Mobile Phone. The Madam Jiang Shuo piece is also known as Red Guards –
Going Forward! Making Money!
Forget that the riot at its zenith involved no more than a few hundred, let’s just press forward to evaluate the follow up. Lau Siu-kai from the Chinese Association of HK and Macau Studies, a think-tank close to Beijing, suggested, in the wake of the Mong Kok civil unrest, that Article 23 should be invoked; Apple Daily says the Central Government classifies the localist groups as separatists; Zhang Xiaoming, director of the Chinese government Liaison Office, said that the incident contained “terrorist tendencies”.
However, minimal should be the detention of Scholarism and Occupy Central’s Derek Lam, albeit he says he was just an onlooker. In a bad dream, this could be a method to strike the Umbrella Movement nonviolent agenda by placing an activist in a scenario of… violence. Not so sharp in its genes but effective, even though this narrative in the last instance calls for the intervention of enforcement, courts and media. Yes, media to write a mo(u)rning post.