As I was quite intrigued by Mr Fong Chi Keong's bragging about 8 members of the legislature being members of the board of the Kiang Wu Charitable Association (the organisation behind the Kiang Wu hospital), I checked, and of course Mr Fong was… right! The whole list can be found here.
The lucky winners who will "supposedly" support Mr Fong, whatever he says or wants are:
As honorary board member (榮譽理事): 高開賢 Kou Hoi In (indirectly elected)
As vice-president (副主席): 張立群 Victor Cheung Lup Kwan (indirectly elected)
As president of the executive committee (理事長): 馮志強 Fong Chi Keong (appointed)
As vice-presidents of the executive committee (副理事長): 劉永誠 Lau Veng Seng (appointed) and 陳明金 Chan Meng Kam (elected)
As managing directors (常務理事): 蕭志偉 Sio Chi Wai (appointed) and 馬志成 Ma Chi Seng (appointed)
As vice-president of the supervisory committee (副監事長): 歐安利 Leonel Alves (indirectly elected)
Four of them are appointed legislators (out of the 7 appointed in total)!
Right before the start of the legislative campaign I was asked to give a talk about “what to expect” from the elections. I basically raised five questions and provided simple and yet straightforward answers. Can we expect a vast overhaul of the Assembly? Certainly not! Can we expect new faces? Not really, and yet… Can we expect a few surprises? Very few, and yet… Can we expect a change in style in the campaign? Most probably as “bottom” seats will be hard-fought. Can we expect a change in the future workings of the Assembly? Only marginally, given the highly expectable overall composition of the new legislature. One soon realizes that political predictions cannot go too wrong if one accommodates enough semantic flexibility to tolerate a plurality of interpretation in one’s own prediction, or to put it more simply, if one pays due tribute to the idea that “everything is in everything”—a trick fortunetellers are well aware of. And yet, somehow, one would prefer to be really wrong sometimes, thus letting the exciting components of true surprise kick in and the benefit of uncertainty, though not fully unrestrained, bring its fair share of excitement.
For directly elected members of the Assembly, results—not necessarily the most desirable ones, one must admit—yield two main lessons. First, the Democrats are not the highest vote-getters in these kind of elections any more, and thus will have to reflect deeply on a strategy that merely favor opposing and confronting the government, its many shortcomings and its cronies. In a more affluent society, one in which the have-nots are getting wealthier even though not at the same pace as the happy few, demands have to be formulated more in terms of alternative and therefore in displaying a capacity to propose and not only to oppose—a perspective fully acknowledged and marginally put in practice by José Pereira Coutinho. During the campaign, all the candidates, including the pro-business ones who have their reasonable share of responsibility in tilting the balance towards their own narrowly defined interests, voiced out the many hardships endured by common folks, an hypocrisy that made the Democrats’ past farsighted claims clearly inaudible. Second, organizational capacity is everything, although it plays along very dissimilar fault lines: Chan Meng Kam’s highly improbable triple win derives from his deep resources, an ethnic community base, a real populist flair for empathizing with ordinary people, the well-advertised supposed achievements of the incumbent, and an open support given by the challengers (junkets, new casino licensees and second-circle traditional political families) to old traditional vested interests (the three big Macao clans). In the case of Mak Soi Kun, the second highest vote getter, the support from the mainland was decisive and he is definitely what comes closer to a pro-Beijing camp in Macao. Finally, traditional associations shifted their support from pro-union to neighborhood related lists, as if Kwan Tsui Hang’s independence of mind had to somehow be trimmed. But potent organizational capacity also produced positive results for José Pereira Coutinho’s list and even, to a lesser degree, for Melinda Chan. The question is for the Democrats and even Coutinho if he wants to pursue further his legally innovative and policy-oriented role: how can any organization continue to be relevant for the community without proper resources (self-generated, on loan or granted)? The only answer lies in a real law on political parties, a law that would allow for a transparent and substantial public financing of political organizations that manage to garner significant results during election time.
Ultimately, only a meaningful assembly, one that is fully elected will make it possible for corruption to be curtailed, real competition to occur and sophisticated policy alternatives to be proposed: in the meantime we are stuck with royal appointments of the rust-roof “big gun” Fong Chi Keong, a close associate of the Ho’s, and the clumsy debut of a tender Ma. On what ground? Business, as usual.
Published in Macau Daily Times, October 11th 2013
It was indeed a small piece of news: a local tycoon’s construction company being granted a renovation work contract for a government building without having to go through a public tender. This is not illegal: the laws that apply make room for exceptions to “public tendering,” and in this case the justification given for the MOP27 million contract was that “security issues” were involved, as the renovation work would take place next to the government headquarters, thus requiring “special and confidential” treatment. Yet I could not help reminding myself what Au Kam San, a democrat legislator, once had said: “exceptions have become the rule in Macao,” giving evidence that out of a few hundred construction and renovation projects that should have gone through public tendering, only a handful had actually complied. In that particular case, the company involved, Man Kan Ltd., had already been granted at least four such contracts by the government, as reported by Hoje Macau, and “all the renovation works for government buildings since the handover” if we trust José Pereira Coutinho, another vocal and independent legislator. Moreover, Man Kan Ltd. is not run by any mini-tycoon… its chairman of the board is none other than Fong Chi Keong, who happens to be also the president of the Association of Building Contractors and Developers, the vice-president of the Macao Chamber of Commerce, the chairperson of the Kiang Wu Charitable Association (founded in 1871) that runs the Kiang Wu Hospital, the chairman of the Macao Daily Readers’ Charity Fund that is behind the charity “Walk for a Million”… and also a legislator, sitting as one of the four indirectly-elected legislators representing the business interests in Macao.
Mr Fong is a well-known figure, and he claims ancestry in the territory over some 200 years, and thus has formed connections that cut across the hold of the four main families (the two Ho, Ma and Chui). A round face adorned with a crew cut and a sharp gaze behind large metal-framed spectacles, he is also known for his coarse language, so much so that a Youtube channel called the “Cannon Channel” 大砲頻道 is dedicated to his many blunders and less than subtle passing judgments. Many times over he has felt threatened by youth, questioning the sanity of young “agent provocateurs” manipulated by old democrats or characterizing young people daring to voice out their frustrations as “losers”. Of course all this is compensated by lavish charity spending in several youth-oriented ventures, as Mr Fong has allegedly given away a hundred million yuan to the Nanhai district for educational purposes—all the more commendable for a man who barely finished high school. For sure Mr Fong does not really approve of the concept of accountability, and he often reacts very buoyantly albeit senselessly when his stewardship is being questioned, whether it concerns the final destination of the money raised by the “Walk for a Million”, the discrepancy in salary raises at Kiang Wu Hospital or even his excessive absenteeism in the legislature… Only his Man Kan Ltd. dealings manage to keep him quiet!
A mere “edit (slightly) and paste” of what was once noted by the great German sociologist Max Weber perfectly applies to Mr Fong: “There are two ways of making politics one’s vocation: Either one lives ‘for’ politics or one lives ‘off’ politics”. In fact, the two often come together: one who lives for a cause also lives off that cause. The problem arises when one exclusively lives “off” politics!
Published in Macau Daily Times, May 24th 2013
