Rear Window | Telling apart good and evil

Severo Portela

These first days of 2017 have been eventful and sufficiently dramatic – I cannot offer a more interesting choice of words – to guess, to anticipate a tough Year of the Rooster. And as the popular saying goes,  when the going gets tough, the tough gets going!

What we are about to try to do is articulate the meaning of a body of loosely connected affairs here and corresponding circumstances across the Pearl River Delta in the sister SAR of Hong Kong.

First and foremost we have the high profile trials of Hong Kong’s ex-Chief Executive and MSAR’s ex-Prosecutor General. Linking the Hong Kong and Macau court cases, besides the public and political weight of both defendants, we would point to the prosaic nature of the crimes of corruption, unlawful economic advantage, abuse of power… and forgive us, the prosaic contempt. Perhaps the evidence of the reality blurs the understanding, but it is hard to put together ex-CE Donald Tsang, a pre-handover civil servant – today he would be called a localist – promoted to the top job under very special circumstances, and a “hopelessly compromised” (SCMP) white collar raider.

The same sense of strangeness comes to mind when we try to picture powerful Prosecutor Ho who once dreamed of the top job, and a life of petty crime that includes massages not specified, coffee capsules and timber, yes, timber. The reports of the court sessions make for good reading… and judging from that narrative, reality beats fiction when the stuff is the parody of argument.

That is all about similarity. The containment of Tsang’s trial and ordeal, rather, ordeal and trial, means that due process is not challenged – the Hong Kong prosecutor promised jurors a “simple story” – like of the sort with the oath-taking imbroglio. Political shadow will not taint current affairs… but now we know that an ex-CE is not an untouchable.

On the contrary, Macau’s Ho Chio Meng’s 1,500-counts-court case threatens to spill to allegedly unintended realms, and it has already, indeed. As we said, the crime count looks a bit common considering it involves someone who has supervised matters like the AML uber trial and all throughout the gaming industry. And of gaming, there was in the HCM trial reference made to a share in a VIP room.

To jump to conclusions, we would say that Hong Kong will keep fighting the political battles outside the courts, even though the only gain for democracy seems to be just to see CYL go home, thus preserving the courts and the common law.

In Macau, we see different signs. Political stuff is kept to a stand-still (cryogenic even) while judiciary and legal problems pile up, and threaten to dent the system or at least erode it in such a way to concern its “agents”… to use the terminology coming from the brand new association of Vong Hin Fai and Chui Sai Cheong, among other lawyers and otherwise. Macau should be aware of the dangers of such a postmodernist association that, if allowed, could erode the meaning of agency and intention, that being rationality itself.

Finally, on a much positive note we have to acknowledge the re-appointment of Echo Chan as coordinator of the Supporting Office to the Permanent Secretariat of the Forum for Economic and Trade Co-operation between China and Portuguese Speaking Countries. Precisely at the moment it will go full throttle with the blessing of Premier Li Keqiang.