Kapok: Trust me if you can

With the cold front coming from the north, the sudden drop in temperature “holding” ground level emissions down and excessive production of fine particulates of 2.5 micrometres—the very lethal tiny bits that get deep in your lungs and are universally recognized, even by CCTV, to be a major cause in the rise of lung and cardio-vascular diseases in our modern society—, I was poised to write about the past-the-looming calamity of air pollution in Macao.

Readings in the past week were far above the 25-35 micrograms per cubic metre average daily threshold flagged by international as well as Chinese regulators: on February 13, the daily average was in the 70 µgrams/m3 and on the 17, there were peaks in the 120 µgrams/m3! We are still quite far from the 347 µgrams/m3 recorded in Beijing yesterday by the American embassy, characterizing the air in the Chinese capital as “hazardous”, but concern is salient, measurable, and cars appear to hold a significant part of the responsibility if the 20-30% drop observed after midnight and up to 8 a.m. is to be relied upon.

It is high time we move from a rather silly Air-Quality-cum-Index smiley to a more owe-inspiring Air Quality Health Index, thus indicating the short-term health risks, just like Hong Kong, inspired by Canada, did last December. This would be all the fairer to Macao as our SAR actually started recording levels of fine particulates before its Pearl River neighbor!

But fine particulates are not the only thing polluting our atmosphere, unfortunately, and these other factors are more political than scientific in nature—and yet translate into mounting and highly visible concerns as well.

First, we have a president of the Legislative Assembly, Mr Ho Iat Seng, deploring on the sidelines of a Spring festival lunch the limitations of his fellow legislators because of their lack of legal training and thus questioning their capacity to grasp the “goals” of policy-making deriving from their lack of “knowledge” and possibly some “confusion” regarding their intended role—a passing comment rather amusing regarding possible conflict of interests when one thinks that Mr Ho is concurrently the only member from Macao of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in Beijing. Going one step further during the same agapes, Mr Chan Chak Mo, president of the second standing committee of the Assembly, even suggested that the legislators should refrain from drafting “projects” of law and let the government exclusively make law “proposals”, that would then of course be duly discussed by legislators.

If individual legislators can always be reminded of their shortcomings during plenary sessions—especially now that debates are publicly broadcasted—it is neither up to Mr Ho or Mr Chan to discuss the “legitimacy” of assemblymen and their “sacred” right of legislative initiative: none of these two august legislators is elected through universal suffrage and the Basic Law, and only it, can prescribe what is the duty of a legislator (art. 75 in that particular case). In Europe, since the Treaty of Lisbon (2009), there is such a thing called the European Citizens’ Initiative, and thus initiative of a legal act rests also directly with the citizens: do citizens need all to be trained in law? Legislative duty, unfortunately, also implies design: if Mr Chan does not feel up to the task, maybe he should either resign or hire more legal advisers. Always hiding behind the necessity for these laws to be the product of “public consultations” is a farce: governing is deciding and leading, not following. Sometimes one has actually to explain to the community why decisions need to be made even at the risk of disquieting the public mood. But in Macao, the air is too polluted by the Lao Si Lo syndrome: everybody claims that he or she “can absolutely face the public”, and then no one actually does…

Published in Macau Daily Times, February 21 2014

Kapok: Progress vs. growth

Ask any resident in Macao and you will probably get the same answer: Chinese New Year has become a real nuisance for our territory, mainly because of the massive arrival of tourists, all channeled along the “axis of consumption” in the city center—and here I am not even plowing into the officially orchestrated permit to pollute the air and the ears of passers-by in the form of a pyrotechnic extravaganza that is truly scaring the dead as well as the living! 
According to the Public Security Police, 915,275 visitors entered Macau between January 31 and February 5, 73% of whom came from the mainland. Overall, that means that one and a half times the total population of Macao entered the territory in less than a week, or close to a third stepped in every single day. Extrapolating from the figures of 2013 (altogether 29.3 million visitors for the whole year), 51% of this massive influx consists of day-trippers: no wonder then that the public transport system is overloaded and the streets jammed when those hasty sightseers have to be carried back to the border-gate on the same day!
Here and there, I have been reading several articulated criticisms regarding this free-flow of tourists into Macao that emphasise the “unsustainability” of the whole situation.
To the drastic measures oriented-ones who remark that in any case more than 70% of Macau’s gambling revenue is derived from VIP tables and that high-rollers tend to deliberately avoid Chinese New Year for the annoyances it brings I say: yes, sure, and yet SMEs are not to be forgotten, and here we are talking about far more than just the over-inflated cosmetics, dry cakes, beef jerky and milk powder outlets. Countless small restaurants and shops actually benefit from the pendulum-like daily invasion, and knowing the importance of “gift-giving” in Chinese culture, I am pretty sure that there is even more room for growth in this area. Of course, that means that some of the heavily visited spots should be “reserved” or “pre-empted” by the government for these small operations to obtain without having to pay hefty rent prices—a preemption based on the multi-pronged sustainability of the project more than the nationality of the operator. 
Clearly put, the ousting of the Cultural Club on San Ma Lo in January or the vacating at the end of 2013 of the Yellow House next to St Paul’s Ruins to make way for the global fashion brand Forever 21 should have been prevented—in the latter case, the Yellow House is owned by Future Bright Holdings, the company managed by legislator Chan Chak Mo, who is supposedly representing the “cultural sector” in the Legislative Assembly! 
The same line of reasoning goes for those who believe that this massive crowd should be funnelled exclusively, or at least mostly, to the Cotai strip: not only will it deprive SMEs of their fair share of the juicy pie, but it will also constitute a missed-opportunity for mass education as to how and why Macao is different from the rest of China—entertainment and the epitome of fake, however professional they are, will never replace culture… it’s like saying “don’t go to Boston if you’ve been to Vegas”! 
To those who, on the contrary, believe that things should be left to market forces and that ultimately tourists will get fed-up of feeling like subway customers at rush-hour in the open air and will thus come up with their own corrective measures, I say: you have no idea what human nature can endure and for how long it can do so in a nation that has been deprived of holidays for 50 years… visit the Yellow Mountain in Anhui province on any given day, and you will get my meaning!
Something needs to be done, that’s for certain, and all the touristic places in the world are faced with the same challenges—83 million Chinese tourists went abroad in 2012, and that number is set to reach 200 million by 2020. Spreading the visitors out across the year and thus imposing quotas is inescapable. It is high time that our GDP indicator be coupled with a Genuine Progress indicator, taking into account social and environmental costs. 
If Bhutan can design and fare well in a Gross National Happiness indicator while still controlling the number of entries to its tiny and modest kingdom, so why can’t Macao, cash-ridden as it is?

Published in Macau Daily Times, February 7th 2014