Tag: Kapok
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Kapok | Scaring a monkey to safeguard the chicken
It is no secret that Macao’s political system is not only overly executive-led and highly dependent on the admonitions coming from up north, but also bogged ... -
Kapok | At a snail’s pace
Looking back at the titles of my column over the past five years, I have now exhausted almost every possible expression to convey the idea of ... -
Kapok | As little as possible
This is rather unfortunate timing. On the one hand the project of law on Labour Unions proposed by José Pereira Coutinho gets defeated during in the ... -
Kapok | Everything must change…
In The Leopard, the beautiful novel by Lampedusa set in slow-changing Sicily, Trancredi’s famous assertion that “everything must change for everything to remain the same” holds ... -
Kapok | Everything’s relative
One thing I’ve learnt over the years is to drastically lower my expectations. Mind you, I don’t mean to be ironic or even nasty: after all ... -
Kapok | Unfair it is
In a two-round election, you follow your heart in the first round and trust your brain in the second. In Macao, we only have one round, ... -
Kapok | Being positive
Let’s start by what could be deemed “positive news” by some: despite (or because) of last week’s upheavals — the dreadful challenges brought about by undeviating ... -
Kapok | The letter versus the spirit
A lot has been said already regarding the so-called “clarifications” issued on August 3 by the Electoral Affairs Commission (CAEAL) in relation to the forbidding of ... -
Kapok | The bickerers
The contrast is quite shocking really: on the one hand, legislators who are either appointed or not even elected, but rather endorsed by corporations and traditional ... -
Kapok | The variable geometry of the ‘one country’
The fact that Macao immigration has been barring some Hong Kong residents from entering the territory of the Macao SAR is widely acknowledged and documented. It ... -
Kapok | The more the merrier, really?
The very fact that 25 lists of candidates vying for the directly elected seats in the September 17 Legislative Assembly election have been recognized valid by ... -
Kapok | Half-full, I say!
Most things in life are about perspective. Even a supposedly clear-cut situation can be seen with very different eyes. Back in 2008, then American senator Barack ... -
Kapok | The art of euphemism
Macao has a bit more to offer than an unlucky hand at a Baccarat table on the Cotai Strip. By unlucky, I mean that although about ... -
Kapok | Suicide in Macao
Émile Durkheim was the first academic to dedicate a whole book to suicide. In his seminal work, the French sociologist was able to distinguish between egoistic, ... -
Kapok | The warning behind the praise
In the morning of May 9, while addressing a large audience supposedly representative of the Macao population, Chairman of the National People’s Congress Zhang Dejiang insisted ... -
Kapok | The pitfalls of populism
It does not happen very often but Mr Fong Chi Keong has a point when he warns the government of the dangers of “populism” in Macao, ... -
Kapok | Everything’s patriotic now!
Patriotism is double-edged: nurture the bond that it entails and it becomes a virtue; make it a blind imperative and venture into dangerous territories in which ... -
Kapok | Choice matters
Despite all the loathing at the pre-screening of candidates for the 2017 Chief Executive election in Hong Kong, having a somewhat contested selection process, with a ... -
Kapok | Clubbing sessions
It’s once again this time of the year when the unique institutional design of the People’s Republic of China displays its highest degree of sophistication: March ... -
Kapok | Smoking gun
Is it me or are we being treated worse than headless chickens with tar-filled lungs? An opinion survey on to smoke or not to smoke in ... -
Kapok | The facts, just the facts
With the advent of “alternative facts” and the dereliction of truth, the destructive and all-encompassing reign of opinion has come of age, with emotions as its ... -
Kapok | The virtues of optimism
For reasons most probably linked to my carefree upbringing, I am resolutely optimistic about human nature, and the capacity for good rather than self-destruction. Given the ... -
Kapok | The missing links
The results of the public consultation pertaining to the “Macao Tourism Industry Development Master Plan”, conducted from May to July 2016, have just been released. Although ... -
Kapok | Another tyranny of numbers
Back in August 2015, I remember musing about the irony that, on the one hand China was the place where the oldest census in the world ... -
Kapok | Frustrating exhilaration
Against all odds, the democratic fervour that has engulfed Hong Kong in the past two years appears far from being abated—quite the contrary. The clear cut ... -
Kapok | Between Scylla and Charybdis
It is again that time of the year when the executive power in Macao is trying very hard to look accountable to the people: the Chief ... -
Kapok | The king is naked
Until the jaw-dropping election of Donald Trump on November 9, all the feverish political discussions I have had on and off-line for almost a month somehow ... -
Kapok | Being ill-equipped
A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a freshly arrived European journalist in Hong Kong who had been told that I was closely following current ... -
Kapok | Plus ça change…
When then Premier Wen Jiabao visited Macao in November 2010, he reminded the SAR government that “power [had] to operate under the sun” and that it ... -
Kapok | The Crux of the Matter
A week ago, HK01, a Hong Kong-based Chinese online newspaper cooperating with The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed that our Chief Executive, Fernando Chui Sai ... -
Kapok | Political maturity
As Kenneth Chan, a former Civic Party legislator, puts it with a sarcastic bitter-sweet smile: advocating “universal suffrage” and “greater democracy” is not “sexy” anymore in ... -
Kapok | Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns
Being once again more in tune, on a daily basis, with politics in Hong Kong, I can now better appreciate how different things are on this ... -
Kapok | The age of submission
It is unsurprising that the proposal of a law reviewing the Electoral Law of the Legislative Assembly, put forward by the government in that very same ... -
Kapok | To hoist or not to hoist…
In this part of the world, and especially at that time of the year, the right meteorological prediction can often be a matter of life and ... -
Kapok | Living together
Being in France just a few days after the horrendous truck attack that took place in the Southern French city of Nice on Bastille Day, claiming ...
