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: 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