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 had been conducted, back in 2 AD, and on the other hand that Macao, the cradle of the encounter between two great scientific traditions, was being run on the basis of extremely farfetched studies and vague figures — dubious in themselves and, far worse, rarely fully available or fully explained.

As I pointed out at the time, censuses constitute the backbone of any public policy, and thus head counts are crucial in determining what policies come first, with what kind of allocation of adequate means. All things being equal, if your population is getting younger, then you might consider building more schools, with roads leading to these and appropriate public transportation to cater to them. If on the contrary, your population is ageing, investing in retirement homes, day-care centres and the training of nurses to visit regularly senior citizens who are ever more physically impaired might prove a wise move. This is pretty straightforward.

At the time, I was aiming at the newly released — and fallacious — Study Report on the Population Policies of Macao, prepared by the government’s Policy Research Office. To my dismay (sort of), the report was actually an exercise in statistics sugarcoating and ex-post facto validation. Tough challenges got buried and recommendations were merely programmatic.

What got to be discussed at the time was the official press release on the report and the declarations made by Lao Pun Lap, the head of the Policy Research Office. To be honest, and even though I have strong reservations about the actual capacity of Mr Lao who has unfortunately been in the job since 2010 [was previously involved with the CEEDS, starting in 2006], the full report made available later in the year did provide interesting points for discussion, despite being overly descriptive rather than prescriptive — after all, the full report is 125 pages long [Please note that the official website is still not available in December 2016: http://www.ppmacau.gov.mo/].

Yet, the flaws of the two key findings that made the headlines in the summer last year — the conservative and optimistic acceptance that the Macao population would reach 710,000 by 2020 and the carrying capacity 22,000 people per sq. km by 2025 — just got manifestly confirmed.

With the publication of the partial results of the 2016 population by-census (the last full census was in 2011), we now know for a fact that the average annual growth rate of the population increased dramatically in the past five years, at 3.3%, compared to an annual 1.9% between 2006 and 2011.

Our population is now 651,000, and if we use this latest yearly average growth rate, that means that the Macao population should reach 741,000 by 2020 and could make it to 765,000 by the next full census of 2021… It is to be noted that the projections posted on the DSEC website actually envision 752,000 by 2021, so one really wonders where the Policy Research Office got its figures from!

With the diversification drive in the making, the planned opening of thousands of new hotel rooms and the services appended to an ageing population, it is difficult to imagine the dynamic of the past five years being curbed, even though one cannot exclude populist measures to be adopted at the approach of the 2017 legislative elections to severely limit the number of new non-resident workers—the bread and butter of the population growth in the past decade.

A more numerous population would thus translate into a more pressing population density, meaning 23,000 people per sq. km.— still “not saturated”? And then, the district of Areia Preta and Iao Hon remained the most populated of the territory, home to more than 75,000 dwellers or a staggering 12% of the population. What is then the actual density in this northern part of the territory? What kind of peculiar social issues does this entail?

The full results of the by-census will only be made public in April 2017: this might explain why population issues just benefitted from a passing comment on only two pages out of 100 in the five-year plan released last September…

Published in Macau Daily Times on December 30th, 2016

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 victory of the pro-democracy camp in the geographic constituencies in September and the advent of a young boisterous generation of self-determination-leaning legislators served as a proof that the spirit of the 2014 Occupy Central with Love and Peace and the subsequent Umbrella Movement had not waned but instead transformed into a fiery force able to rock the boat of institutional politics from within.

Then came the so-called “oath-taking controversy” triggered by legislators-elect Baggio Leung and Yau Wai-ching, that ultimately led to them being unseated by Hong Kong’s High Court on November 15. In the meantime, the pro-establishment camp had ridiculed itself by engaging in self-deprecating bickering and absenteeism and the central authorities had been somehow convinced that a heavy-handed intervention in the form of a secretly sought interpretation of the Basic Law would “scare the chickens by killing the monkeys”.

Up to 15 legislators could fall victim of the ruling, if Wang Zhenmin, the legal advisor of the Hong Kong Liaison Office, was to be trusted. Ultimately, “only” four others are being submitted to a new judicial review instigated by CY Leung and his Secretary for Justice on December 2, including veteran activist “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung and Edward Yiu Chung-yim, the newly elected assistant professor representing the Architectural, Surveying, Planning and Landscape (ASPL) functional constituency.

Yet the whole process had but two consequences: on the one hand, the pro-democracy camp has regrouped and is now displaying a resolute unity in denouncing the illegitimacy of Beijing’s ruling: by equating the provocative independence drive of a few with the self-determination-leaning stance of the many, what was originally a discordant aggregate had been turned into a united bloc; on the other hand, the public is becoming ever more wary of the situation, and the public sentiment index released by Hong Kong University on December 15 indicates a plunge of 7.1 points compared to November—Government Appraisal faring the worst—with a level that is becoming dangerously close to the low tide of January 2016 when the disappearance of the Causeway Bay booksellers started to unravel.

No doubt that the announcement, on December 9, by CY Leung himself that he would not run—allegedly for “family reasons”—for a second term in the coming March Chief Executive election was intended as a gesture of conciliation or even a disguised admission of failure: the long-term dislike of and distrust in “689” (the number of votes he received in 2012) aka “the wolf” was yet again underscored on December 13, when another HKU survey revealed that Leung is now the least appreciated Chief Executive since the handover, at only 35 points, beating even the dwindling approval rate of Tung Chee-hwa at the time of the combined SARS and Article 23 crisis!

But if there is one thing that the Hong Kong electorate has learnt from these troubling times it is that their voice will only be faithfully defended by a handful few, whatever the context and the venue, and even though these few cannot be the majority by institutional design they have to become more numerous: on December 11, the pro-democracy camp thus won more than a quarter of the seats on the Election Committee that will designate the next Chief Executive in March 2017. 325 seats out of 1,200! In the election committee subsectors of Social Welfare, Information Technology, Health Services, Legal, Education and Higher Education, the pro-democrats won all the seats and they won a majority in accountancy, ASPL, medical and engineering—all of these knowledge-based!

Out of curiosity I checked if this could ever happen in Macao—thus allowing some form of competition—but unfortunately, even in the more spirited social or education sectors, pro-establishment figures rule and command the votes, including present-day Secretaries and soon-to-be recipients of the Golden and Silver Lotus(es). In Macao, nothing short of universal suffrage can change the system.

Published in Macau Daily Times, December 16, 2016