Kapok: Imperious engagement

Agreed, for society to engage with the state, the government, rules have to be prescribed and followed, and yet, engagement, on society’s part, is as much a matter of orderly procedure as it is a staple of creative novelty, especially when demands appear to fall on deaf ears on the receiving end. Few regimes in the world, with the patent exception of North Korea, openly advocate the irrelevance of the people—and even for supremo Kim the Third, it is only because he has been led to believe that he is the stellar guide and the god-like embodiment of “his” people on earth. For idealist and progressive minds, the strength and balance of a democratic regime depend on the existence of a vibrant “civil society” engaging the state, even though very often this means contesting it. This has proven true for most of the peaceful transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy, and this is equally significant in more established democratic settings, those in which citizens have started to question the validity of a purely electoral definition of democracy that only cares about citizen-voters every 4 to 5 years—what scholars dub “liberal democracy disenchantment”. Hence the fad for participatory democracy, public consultations, deliberative polling and “civil sector” partaking in government to partly compensate for the ubiquitous “careerisation” of politics. I am being cynical here, as if it was a mere instrumentalisation on the side of politicians—some kind of conspiracy to preserve the domination of the few on the many by defusing revolutionary threats—, but these forms of engagement are actually designed to restore the legitimacy of a regime that claims to be by, of and for the people.
The same rationale goes for dictatorships and for what political scientists call “anocracies”—a midway between autocracy and democracy in which vested interests compete among themselves and yet confiscate power. Whatever the regime, what matters ultimately is for ruling elite to last and moreover, for their natural or anointed inheritors to outlive them in the same capacity—here, Kim the Third is truly an exception, and even the most obscure despotic apprentice knows it. Hence the necessity for the “people” to be solicited and consulted in order to keep track of the common good, even though there are no electoral mechanisms to make the rulers accountable. Of course, the exercise has its limits, even in a place as sophisticated as China. Cao Shunli, one of the most respected and eminent “petitioners” paid this very fact with her life on March 14: arrested at Beijing International Airport on September 14 last year while on her way to Geneva to attend a human rights event, she was only indicted in December for “picking quarrels to create disturbances” and ultimately fell into a coma at the end of February because of appalling detention conditions, only to die a few weeks after. Petitioning for Cao Shunli, a law graduate, had become the only “channel” to reach a government necessarily comprehended as benevolent—her “petitioner” crusade started back in 2002 after she had been sacked from her work unit for exposing corruption in housing distribution. This time around, many believe she was actually arrested because of the two-month long sit-in she organized along 60 other petitioners in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to request to participate in the drafting of the ‘National Human Rights Action Plan’, as law—Chinese law—entitled her to.
In Macao, petitioning is not as lethally hazardous, but the fact that out of 900 petitions addressed to Mr Chui Sai On in 2013, only 82 have been answered directly, a bit less than 600 sent to relevant secretaries and 306 archived without any kind of reply has prompted disquieted comments by some analysts—mainly stressing that the Chief Executive was wrong to treat so lightly the ever expanding power of the people to directly voice their anxieties. I would add that first of all we would need to know a bit more about the relevance of the answers produced by the Chief Executive and his secretaries—ask legislators how their queries to the government are being timely and adequately treated… And then, why should “direct” contacts with the highest authorities via petitions or radio call-in show take precedence over “mediated” and “informed” probing coming from “concerned groups”, media and legislators?

Published in Macau Daily Times, March 21 2014

Kapok: NIMBY, Macao style

Back in November 2010, Chief Executive Chui Sai On’s intent was clear and the direction chosen unhindered: “Regarding the development of tourism products, after heeding public opinion, and conducting analyses and assessments, the Government proposes an underground mall at Sai Van Lake Square as a trial location for developing a souvenir shopping complex and night market. This will showcase Macao cuisine and delicacies, and will become an integrated tourism project, after upgrading the relevant facilities through an open bidding process.” Of course, not everything went as planned.
First, the initial consultation for the project of a Sai Van lake permanent night market only occurred in November 2011. In the meantime, due processes for “public consultations”, the new fad in benevolent and opinion-led governance in lieu of democratic procedures, had changed: one round of public consultation would not be enough anymore, and a second round taking into account the lessons learnt from the first one would have to be organized. In that particular case, we were lucky rules had changed and government agencies had been slow in putting Mr Chui’s candid words into practice. The first public consultation was not only a disaster, but also marred by irregularities and opacity. Depending on who was doing the counting, opinions gathered ranged from a few dozen up to a maximum of 180, and only 8 such opinions had disapproved of the plan… But these results, without further comments, were only made public in October 2012(!), whereas regulations for public consultations state that it should take no more than 180 days after completion of the process.
Dissent and protest — too bad for consensus building — were soon to be heard: residents from the area started petitioning; concerned groups dealing with environmental and livelihood issues went marching and cycling around the lake, and even business interests made it clear as early as November 2012 that the whole project was plain wrong, both in intent and sustainability. Interestingly enough, David Chow Kam Fai, husband of legislator Melinda Chan Mei Yi and Macau Legend Development chief executive, expressed in a long op-ed published in the very conservative Macau Daily News his doubts about the “free market” side of the “open bidding process” — being the CEO of Fisherman’s Wharf Investment Ltd. might have made Mr. Chow pretty perceptive of the issue lying beneath less than fair competition. In reality, apart from the Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau that had been entrusted with the project, only one public figure openly continued to support the scheme: legislator Chan Chak Mo. Incidentally representing the cultural sector in the Assembly, but mostly his own interests as the executive director of restaurant operator Future Bright Holdings Ltd, Mo nonetheless finds time to be the president of the Association of Macao Restaurant Merchants, the main organizer of the yearly Food Festival since 2001 precisely set on the banks of the… Sai Van lake!
So, a second consultation round was organized from December 2012 to March 2013. The press had already echoed vociferous sessions held with the general public, and even raucous exchanges with associations convened in closed-door meetings, including the usually pro-government General Union of the Neighborhood Associations and the Federation of Trade Unions that had expressed either a resolute opposition or suggested a relocation and a downsizing of the whole plan. But the official results of that consultation that came out on September 19 surpassed all expectations. More than 1,100 opinions were collected and an additional survey was conducted over the phone by the University of Macao with 1,529 respondents to envision what kind of facilities could be developed around the lake: overall, the initial night market project freely inspired by Clark Quay in Singapore and Tamsui night market in northern Taiwan was rejected by more than 70% of the population, and if a good 60% of the people surveyed over the phone want more facilities, they believe these should be more in line with green paths and walking/jogging tracks. From the “positioning”, the project itself to the localization, all three were heavily rejected: could this be the start of a “Not-In-My-Backyard” movement, with Macanese characteristics?

Published in Macau Daily Times, September 27th 2013

Kapok: In tune with the times

Edward Snowden and his challenge to the mighty US government have now become a modernized version of David vs. Goliath, and Snowden himself a household name for courage and determination in the fight for the defense of civil liberties. Knowledge and the circulation of data have replaced the sling, but the story remains the same: the seemingly invincible can be defeated if one is dexterous enough to find a hole in the armor. By exposing several classified intelligence programs run by the American and British intelligence services, among which we find the interception of US and European telephone metadata (the ins and outs of phone calls and not their actual content) as well as Internet surveillance programs such as PRISM and Tempora, Edward Snowden, a former technical contractor with the CIA and NSA, has become the epitome of what is now commonly characterized as a “whistleblower”, simply defined by Princeton’s WordNet as “an informant who exposes wrongdoing within an organization in the hope of stopping it.” What is at stake here is a possible abuse of power by the state apparatus and whether these surveillance programs are duly overseen by both the judiciary and the legislative so that encroachment over civil rights remain minimal and justifiable. Ultimately, there is a balance to be struck between one’s founding values—justice and liberty—on the one hand and the indisputable primacy of the safety that each and every state is supposed to guaranty to its own citizens on the other hand. Blowing the whistle in that case was to demand for more scrutiny over a possible imbalance between one and the other.
Whistleblowers come in every color and every hue. Among the most high profile and charismatic as well as controversial figures of a whistleblower, Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange is clearly unmatched. Snowden in comparison appears far more accidental and unassuming, although his odyssey to escape prosecutions in America has captivated the world’s imagination—from Hawaii to Moscow with a short spell in Hong Kong. Despite all the present tensions between Russia and the US, especially about Syria and Iran, Putin himself has declared that Snowden could only stay in his country if he stopped “leaking secrets”! States of the World, unite against the whistleblowers! It is then no wonder that when Dr. Jiang Yanyong, the chief physician of the 301 Military Hospital in Beijing, sent his letter to denounce the cover up of the SARS epidemic back in April 2003, neither Chinese Central Television-4 (state-run) or PhoenixTV (state-connected) decided to report the story. It is only when The Wall Street Journal and Time picked up the story that authorities in China were forced to react. In Snowden’s case, the British Guardian and the American New York Times did play a crucial role. In Macao, whistleblower-cum-politician Jason Chao has to go one step further and resort to pose as a journalist—a citizen journalist to be more precise—because civil society, including the media, is so embroiled in a patron-client relation with the state that the Gramscian understanding of it as one of ‘hegemony’ and the ‘manufacture of consent’ has become prevalent.
Of course I find it all the more ironic to write this column on a 4th of July, a day on which the US celebrate the fact “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” I cannot help but think that no other country on the planet, despite all its imperfections and misdeeds, has ever held these truths so evidently. A country that always found in its own ranks the vital force to better itself cannot be embarrassed: it can only grow stronger!

Published in Macau Daily Times, July 5th 2013