As is often the case with sayings, their actual meaning is commonly debatable and easily twisted by the interest and the context of the moment. Such is the case with “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, that pulls together two sets of meanings. On the one hand, related to permissiveness and secrecy—you can engage in anything borderline in Vegas, but whatever you do out there will not spill over Vegas’s vicinity—and on the other, connected to absolute otherness—this is only possible in Vegas. Apart from the fact that this sin-charged marketing motto strikes a particular cord for us in Macao, this is the expression that popped into my mind while reading reports about recent declarations made in Beijing by Peter Lee Ka-kit, Hong Kong-based Henderson Land Development’s vice chairman, in which he stated that “polls” conducted by University of Hong Kong’s Public Opinion Programme were “biased” against the pro-establishment/pro-Beijing camp in the SAR. He went on namely to target the programme’s director, Robert Chung, by questioning the scientific character of the polls and came up with a “pragmatic” solution according to which a selected few trade associations, naturally pro-establishment, would start funding alternative polls that would be conducted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the two competitors of Mr. Chung’s institution among the top tier universities in our sister SAR. Very pragmatic indeed, as any businessman should be: if you are not happy with a supplier, just go to another one!
These remarks were made in Beijing during a meeting held on the fringe of the annual ten-day-long annual full session of the National People’s Congress (NPC) between delegates from Hong Kong and Macao to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), of which Peter Lee is a member of the standing committee, and NPC chairman Zhang Dejiang. Let’s just recall that this annual meeting of the NPC is the only moment of the year when the supervisory power of this otherwise rubber-stamp assembly can somehow frailly glow—the government’s budget is always approved, but sometimes only by 80% of the members!—and that the CPPCC, in itself a purely advisory body, is supposed to help engage in “political consultation” with and perform “democratic supervision” of the Communist Party. In theory, members of the CPPCC can thus be expected to display some kind of innovative thinking that can help the Party better itself. In practice, it is far too often the occasion for prominent exemplary citizens to exhibit their absolute submission to the current Party line. Journalists in Beijing noted that Peter Lee’s remarks along with the ones made by another tycoon’s progeny, Victor Li Tzar-kuoi (son of Asia’s richest man, Li Ka-shing, and also a CPPCC standing committee member) characterizing the Occupy Central movement as being contrary to Hong Kong’s core values, were made just hours after a high-level official from the central government liaison office had urged Hong Kong members of the CPPCC to speak more openly against Occupy Central.
That leads me back to my saying, this time with a local flavor: let’s hope that what happens in Beijing stays in Beijing, even though this doesn’t bode well for much needed political reforms in the first system. But can it really be so? What is there to gain, apart from radicalization, in adding worries over academic freedom to nagging questioning about threats to the freedom of the press in our neighboring SAR? And then, will what happens in Hong Kong stay in Hong Kong? On one side, we have businessmen suggesting the government “dissolve the people and elect another,” to echo Bertold Brecht’s famous verse, and on the other side we are expected to remain impervious to menaces growing on our doorstep. But of course, in Macao, we seem to be content with the simple fact that Mr Chui has finally ended the excruciating speculations about his candidacy for a second mandate and we have our own businessmen suggesting that legislators should simply forfeit their right to legislative initiative. Nothing to worry about, really.
Published in Macau Daily Times, March 7 2014
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