The dark reality behind wartime Macau’s neutrality: Lopes

Helena F. S. Lopes, historian

Interview
Times Reporter

During an in-depth interview with the Portuguese news magazine Visão earlier this year, historian Helena F. S. Lopes offered an arresting new portrait of wartime Macau – a chapter largely ignored on both sides of the Eurasian map.

Having studied Chinese, spent two years in Taiwan, and mined archives in Beijing, Lisbon, and London, Lopes reframes the Portuguese enclave as a volatile crossroads where neutrality was anything but passive. Her book “Neutrality and Collaboration in South China – Macau During the Second World War” (Cambridge University Press, 2023) makes the case that the city functioned as a critical hinge in East Asian strategy, not a sleepy colonial backwater.

Macau’s population exploded from roughly 120,000 to 400,000 between 1936 and 1940, as refugees from mainland China and British-ruled Hong Kong fled the Japanese advance. Diplomats rubbed shoulders with penniless farmers; gambling fortunes coexisted with famine.

Popular culture has long polished this chaos into the image of the “Casablanca of the East,” yet Lopes insists that the veneer masks much darker truths. “Macau, during the war, was a real film,” she says, “but not the romantic kind – there was hunger, persecution, censorship, and death.” Archive telegrams report corpses collected at dawn and even episodes of cannibalism – details the Portuguese administration tried to suppress. “The governor himself referred to cases of cannibalism in his telegrams to Lisbon,” Lopes notes, “though he tried to limit their disclosure.”

Portugal’s Estado Novo dictatorship kept its own citizens in the dark. Domestic newspapers revealed little about the enclave, and Lisbon made the key decisions. By contrast, Nationalist-controlled Chinese media debated Macau openly, with writers urging its return to Chinese sovereignty. “In Portugal, the public had no say in how the empire was managed,” Lopes says. “Meanwhile, in China, people were debating Macau in provincial assemblies.”

In the Visão interview, Lopes stresses that Portuguese authorities were merely one actor among many. Japanese intelligence officers, British agents, Chinese guerrillas, and American diplomats all exploited Macau’s neutrality. That very weakness – Portugal’s limited military reach – created space for ad hoc humanitarian corridors, smuggling rings, and informal diplomacy that kept the city functional. “Macau was many things,” Lopes says. “It wasn’t just shaped by colonial ambitions – it was the product of local understandings, improvisation, and survival.”

Lisbon’s ambitions occasionally outstripped its capacities. The Estado Novo considered occupying the nearby islands of Lapa, Dom João, and Montanha (Hengqin), assuming Japan might support such moves. But “Japan wasn’t interested – they went wherever they wanted, without asking Portugal’s permission,” she says. The idea that Portugal could expand its holdings was more fantasy than plan.

Neutrality itself proved contradictory. Hospitals in the enclave treated wounded Chinese resistance fighters, while Japanese agents monitored those same facilities. Commercial smugglers served all sides. “There were arrangements at the border to allow even guerrillas to receive treatment in Macau,” Lopes reveals. “But make no mistake – the Japanese could have occupied Macau in three days if they wanted to.”

Still, wartime cosmopolitanism planted seeds for the post-war era. Thousands of refugees from Shanghai and Canton opened businesses, launched newspapers, and revived Cantonese opera. “Some of these people would go on to shape Cold War Macau,” Lopes explains, “including a young Stanley Ho, who fled from Hong Kong.”

Today, official slogans still celebrate Macau as a bridge between cultures. Lopes acknowledges the narrative but urges nuance. “The idea of Macau as a peaceful meeting point is recycled across both the colonial and post-colonial periods,” she says. “That doesn’t make it false – but it wasn’t always peaceful, and it wasn’t always coexistence.”

While civil liberties fluctuate – especially under Beijing’s tightening grip over Hong Kong – Macau remains a place where opportunity and refuge can still be found. The historian’s counsel is clear: resist tidy myths, examine the messy record, and recognize that the enclave’s fate has always hinged on the delicate art of navigating larger powers. 

*The original interview, conducted by Sílvia Souto Cunha, was published in Visão, on February 10, 2025.