Kapok: Toothless labor organizations

I was recently reminded that in the years leading to the handover, the Portuguese administration had expressed the wish, almost on an annual basis, to move forward with the long-delayed passing of a trade union law in Macao. However, at the time, with the constraints of the transfer of sovereignty becoming more pressing, all projects or proposals of law had to be submitted “informally” for prior approval to the Xinhua News Agency, the one institution that served as Beijing’s unofficial representation prior to the establishment of the Liaison Office in 2000.

Few people remember that the Xinhua News Agency had itself replaced the Nam Kwong in 1987, and the latter is still a force to reckon with in present-day Macao, both economically and politically, as it employs, for example, the likes of legislator Mak Soi Kun, who, in the past few weeks, has been making his high-pitched voice heard in favor of installing CCTV cameras all over the streets while recommending teaching “national security” in schools.

Xinhua’s refusal to “grant” a trade union law to Macao is easily understandable. For a start, the move was considered as useless: in the People’s Republic of China, the All China Federation of Trade Unions was (and still is) a mass organization directly supervised by the Chinese Communist Party, thus the mere idea of an “independent” relay in society representing the workers’ interests did not strike a chord. Moreover, the Macao Federation of Trade Unions (FAOM) already existed — “sponsored” by the Chinese communists at the end of the 1950s [actually early 1950s]— and it had faithfully served its purpose by ensuring stability for the good sake of the colonial administration and swiftly channelling the political guidance of Beijing. Finally, the initiative looked rather suspicious: after all, the colonizers had had ample time to pass such a piece of legislation, why the sudden rush? Why now and not then?

Could things change for the better after 1999? Looking back at 1992, that was the year when Fernando Chui Sai On got elected for the first time at the Legislative Assembly on a ticket representing… the Macao Federation of Trade Unions! The charity arms of business interests in the territory take good care of the most deprived members of society, so much so actually that it prohibits them from being genuinely represented.

Thus, although the right to form and join a union is enshrined in Article 27 of the Macao Basic Law and constitutes a significant component of at least three international covenants and conventions of which Macao is a signatory, there is no way the benevolent entrepreneurs who run the show will ever introduce such a law on their own, without a strong enough push from the ones vying for it. Legislator José Pereira Coutinho knows it more than anyone else: he tried to introduce a trade union law on nine occasions and failed flatly every single time. And even when he got the support of the “yellow” FAOM — in this part of the world, we say “tofu union” — it was never enough to tilt the balance in the right direction.

Back in 2007, when we still had dozens of independent organizations taking to the streets and 5 or 6,000 demonstrators showing up on May 1, some saw the possibility for a very embryonic bona fide civil society to develop. That was the time when plainclothes policemen would shoot in the air to intimidate the crowd! The next year, the wealth-partaking scheme went into effect.

Fast forward to today: May 1 has become a total fraud! The FAOM organizes banquets with the government on the evening of April 30, and its main demand concerns a few extra bank holidays that fall on Sundays! The most vocal demonstrators defend their property rights, and trust more the Liaison Office than Mr Tam! Meanwhile, labour rights in Macao have remained the same since… the mid-1980s! Consumers of the world, Unite!

Published in Macau Daily Times on May 4, 2018

Kapok: Unsophisticated zealots

Some people never fail to disappoint you, or rather to meet your expectations as being the least principled human beings there are.

Former dancers incapable of uttering three sentences with the slightest sense of community-oriented interest will dress up like juvenile Chinese Communist Youth League or even communists martyrs in Jinggangshan to put a show on what it means to be a patriot.

The fact that many people in both Hong Kong and Macao came as political refugees escaping the horrors of the Great Leap Forward or the Great Cultural Revolution seems to have been forgotten (always remember that when it is “Great”, it is most probably equally destructive, especially with “Great Leaders”!), thus showing that historical memory in the low forehead of ill-intentioned individuals will never perform what it is supposed to achieve, that is to prevent — at least try to — the most hideous self-inflicted man-made tragedies.

To these patriots I say: give up your foreign passport and move to the first system; stop praising the first one while enjoying the benefits of the second whose guarantee depends on people you keep insulting (or suspending)!

Legislator Mak Soi-kun belongs to this group of unsophisticated zealots who would simply be laughable if they were not dangerous. Oh! mocking we still do, just like when Mr Mak suggested last December that the reasons presiding over the destruction brought forth by Typhoon Hato could be found in the absence of patriotic sentiment displayed by the administrators in charge of the Weather Bureau! Even his usual partners in zealotry could not support him this time, and he had to concede defeat when his motion to push for more “patriotic education” among civil servants was turned down.

This is the kind of ridiculous claim that gives the people of Jiangmen 江門, the folk group supporting Mr Mak and his simpleton second in command, Zheng Anting, its nickname of Gangmen 肛門, meaning “anus” — a homophonic pun in Cantonese. This became an online meme on social media during the massive May 2014 protests against the government, when members of the Macao Jiangmen Communal Society were herded to take part in the unique yet sparse procession supporting the government. When interviewed by TDM at the time, most of the rather elderly participants admitted not being aware as to why they were taking part in the walk.

To be honest, this is not fair to Jiangmen, as it is the one place in Guangdong that provided a lot of courageous Chinese emigrant workers who built the railroads in the US, for example. Jiangmen was itself an open city to international trade starting in the early years of the 20th century. Kaiping, the UNESCO heritage site of the dialou, is a county that is part of Jiangmen, and testifies to a unique form of rural globalization. It is said that 100,000 people in Macao can trace their ancestry to Jiangmen, and I wonder how they actually feel about such ridiculous assertions.

And then, this week Mr Mak followed up on his “patriotic” obsession, claiming that one of the main reasons why the youth in Macao was not able to properly embrace its “love for Macao and for the motherland” had to do with the lack of proper markings alluding to the People’s Republic of China, hence his proposal to add such a reference to the ID card of every citizen — the first administrative document a teenager will have in his or her possession!

When it was still possible to conduct independent surveys in Macao, then professor Bill Chou was able to show that the usually assumed patriotic nature of Macao society was most probably an overstatement whose survival depended on Chinese language newspapers filled with patriotic rhetoric and richly-endowed traditional and communal associations.

Why the need to move to a post-2049 reference in 2018 then? Is the Macao youth in line with the one in Hong Kong who majoritarily supports independence? Is it an identity problem or the growing sense of an educated civil society that not all aspects of an authoritarian regime are worth espousing?

Published in Macau Daily Times on March 2, 2018

Kapok: The virtues of optimism

For reasons most probably linked to my carefree upbringing, I am resolutely optimistic about human nature, and the capacity for good rather than self-destruction. Given the present context, this has become a challenging position to hold: ineptocracy and populism prevail, and rational discourse has been submerged by emotive boasting. One of my secrets for this enduring optimism has been to keep my expectations low: being reasonably hopeful prevents roller-coaster effects, bearing in mind that what goes up will ultimately come down – and vice-versa.

When I read in some headlines this week that Mak Soi Kun, the legislator with the second-highest vote in 2013, was questioning the statistics provided by the Policy Research Office of the government in relation to population growth by 2020, it initially prompted a significant amount of exhilaration in my cortex: could it be that Mr Mak had read my column four weeks ago – the vanity of me! Could it be that the Study Report on the Population Policies of Macao is so obviously baloney that even a below-average – duty wise – legislator realises such and starts to question publicly the basis of such an important piece of decision-making material?

I had in mind that Mr Mak had fulfilled close to zero of the eight promises he made during his campaign, so, I went beyond the catchy titles, and confirmed that apples never fall far from the tree: instead of disputing the forecasted population figure of 710,000 by 2020 as too conservative, he was actually wondering why it was so high. Clearly, Mr Mak does not read Macau Daily Times, and obviously doesn’t get projections and reports from the Statistics and Census Office either, otherwise he would know that the DSEC has made a forecast of 752,000 by 2021 and that given the by-census latest results, the average growth rate of the past five years can reasonably lead us to believe that the population could reach 741,000 by 2020.

But then we will enter an electoral year, so Mr Mak was posturing as the true defender of the “real” Macao residents’ interests. The response of the head of the Policy Research Office was of similar nature: “this is actually just an indicative number,” he said, and of course only a limited happy few will be allowed to enter the gold-paved territory of our beloved SAR! No mention of the thousand hotel rooms opening in the next five years. No mention of the quadrupling of our territory because of the further integration with Hengqin.

Considering what Mr Mak stands for, this is worrying: he has Liaison Office endorsement; he works for the Nam Kwong, a company that openly states that it is “directly under the central government based in Macao”; and he, together with his second in command, Zheng Anting (a former junket operator), represent the Jiangmen communal associations – a very influential grassroots and pro-establishment network of associations of people originating from a neighbouring district (claiming up to 100,000 potential supporters), that benefits from lavish Macao Foundation funding. These are also the people who were directly involved in the Sin Fong Garden imbroglio. I don’t mind that Mr Zheng was not born in Macao, as he actually reflects the electorate: less than 39% of the 2017 electorate were born in Macao, whereas 54% were born in China. The question remains though: what interests are these people actually defending? And the same goes for Mr Chan Meng Kam (also not born in Macao), the so-called “king of the votes” who supposedly gives the communal interests of Fujian a voice in politics.

Contrary to some hasty news reports, there will be fewer people below 30 voting this year, compared to 2013: so indeed, the virtues of optimism will require due cultivation.

Published in Macau Daily Times on January 27th, 2017

Kapok: Moaners

When I voiced concern in my column last February that Ho Iat Seng, the newly sworn-in president of the Legislative Assembly, was openly deploring the lack of “legal training” of legislators and thus questioning their ability to grasp public policy issues, and that Chan Chak Mo, the president of the second permanent commission of the same Assembly, was caught saying legislators should refrain from drafting “projects” of law and exclusively let the government make law “proposals”, I did so in pointing out that these two respectable figures of our community had basically decided on their own to interpret the Basic Law and let go of a key component of the legislators’ power, that is precisely to initiate legislation, as stipulated in article 75 of the Basic Law.

The right of initiative held by legislators is indeed true power and constitutes one of the few “actual” prerogatives that mitigates the derogatory judgment that the Macao legislature is nothing but a “rubber stamp” assembly—toothless and, above all, indefectible, as a whole, in its support to the executive. Power as it allows at minima to elevate the gravitas of the debate and help clarify the stand of each and every stakeholder: a good example of that is the Law on the Fundamental Rights to form Trade Unions that has been pushed by José Pereira Coutinho several times and got defeated (again) in April by just 14 votes to 9. Power as it forces the government to change its order of priority when it comes to policy-making: again, I believe that it is Coutinho’s continuous drive to have an Animal Protection Law that ultimately forced the municipal affairs administration (IACM) to come up with a law that was unanimously introduced in the first reading last month, whereas the IACM had been “promising” that law for more than a decade. And finally, the capacity to “make” a law and not only to vote on or amend it epitomizes the essence of the “legislative power” of that branch of government: the Law on the Protection of Private Data, which was considered up to this summer one of the most advanced pieces of legislation when it comes to the protection of citizens’ rights, was indeed introduced in 2005 by a collective of 8 legislators, including 3 directly elected ones.
If this right to properly raise awareness, set the agenda of policy-making and legislate is forfeited, what is left then? Mere complaints that the government is not fast or good enough? If Melinda Chan champions the rights of the children so much, why doesn’t she come up with a piece of legislation herself? There are plenty of legal advisors in town to help her out—both in Portuguese and Chinese, and outside or inside the Assembly. But the problem is precisely that most of the businessmen-turned politicians conceive their role as having somewhat to do with populist brawling and badly acted moaning.
How can one otherwise explain the high-pitched whining of Mak Soi Kun regarding the noise disturbance generated by the Grand Prix whereas the Law on the Prevention and Control of Environmental Noise had already been voted in August, including favorably by himself? What credit can we give to legislators’ complaints about the level of execution of the government’s budget in November when the second permanent commission never found the time to review the mid-year report provided by the government in August? One of my friends who owns a pretty big business in China has the following slogan plastered on all the walls of his factory: “Winners find solutions, losers only find excuses.” No chance of losing when the game is not opened to competition.
And mind you, legislators cannot really propose laws on every single topic and issue: public expenditure, political structure or the operation of the government are expressly (and safely) out of bound. Legislators Ng Kuok Cheong and Au Kam San had thus to propose a mere debate on political reform and the implementation of universal suffrage in Macao. Expectedly, the proposal was vetoed by 27 legislators out of 33: when concerns get crucial and opinions become power, silence is then golden.

Published in Macau Daily Times, November 21 2014.

Kapok: Wasted Opportunity

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