Rear Window: Be prepared

Severo Portela

1. As we write this column, unaware of the key players in Chui Sai On’s second team of secretaries, we have to rely on President Xi Jinping’s political endorsement. This is as encompassing as it is cryptic.
Xi Jinping, besides formally congratulating the MSAR Chief Executive, gave an overall positive assessment of Chui’s first term, specifically on the development of the economy, on the improvement of people’s livelihoods, and on improving the communication with the mainland. One would say that it is plain political protocol, but the truth is that President Xi highlighted the way that the CE administration has been coping with its challenges. This is something we can read as a positive evaluation on the handling of social movements – mainly the demonstrations on May 25 and 27.
However, if we disregard this congratulatory remark on coping with new challenges, particularly towards these five years, this mood changes to a warning status. “The internal and external environments of Macau have witnessed great changes that will require better work from the new administration,” claims Xi Jinping.
If we delve further into Xi’s statements on the appointment of Chui Sai On, we find a higher key than warning. The president allegedly wants “better work,” since Macau faces new changes caused by internal and external factors. However, the warning goes deeper as China’s President warns the MSAR Chief Executive “not to disappoint the central government and Macau residents.”
Who would guess that the current situation in Hong Kong was to enter a fast lane of confrontation between the so-called “Scholarism,” Federation of Students and Occupy Central, and CY Leung and Hong Kong conservatives. How’s that for an internal/external factor?

2. Fellow MDT Contributing Editor Eric Sautedé needs nobody to plead his case against USJ. We nonetheless regard solidarity as mandatory, as a duty towards a teacher who was avowedly sacked on political grounds. This is the case, and has nothing to do with the later bureaucratic rationale about the qualifications of the unfairly dismissed veteran lecturer of political science. Again, the case is so crystal clear that is impossible to draw it in murky waters.
The Catholic University vice-rector’s late typhoon season visit to Macau and his character assassination comments on the case pushed Sautedé to publish an open letter to refute or rebalance the new arguments voiced to justify his abrupt lay-off from USJ. And in doing so, in his closing remarks, Sautedé mentioned a “kind of twisted form of supposedly long-gone ‘lusotropicalism’ at work here.”
Although we are completely at ease with everything associated with a Portuguese metaphor that belongs to a long gone past, we have to be afraid that, when removed from its original context, it can be the source of deprecating dialogue. Misunderstandings are, after all, commonplace.
For example, José Gil, the Portuguese philosopher who was recently in Macau for some lectures, published an editorial (Portugal’s and the Portuguese fear to exist), which can be misread as democracy going wrong, or, worse, Portuguese deteriorating in an ontological sense. If it were the ethics case, we would go for the real thing: Spaniard Fernando Savater. Anyway, we do prefer fellow Mozambican-born philosopher Fernando Gil.