Kapok: Paper patriots

Patriotism is a double-edged sword: mustered adequately it becomes a potent mantra for the community to feel more united, but a ponderous and rather superfluous summon can easily devoid it of any meaning, and ultimately be conducive to a suspicion that ulterior motives are at play. Patriotism then serves as a disguise, an absolute injunction voiced by people who do not want issues to be discussed and addressed, and thus the call to patriotism acts as a cover-up. Very often, it also helps castigate the people you disagree with as “traitors” and “enemies of the nation”, and when at war or in a revolutionary situation, there can be no worse characterisation as it often entails the worst possible sanction.

In Hong Kong and Macao, the debate about what constitutes a “good” patriot is a story intertwined with the history of contemporary China. Sun Yat Sen, the father of the Republic that we celebrate every October 10th, found refuge, resources as well as a stage in both foreign enclaves to lambast the Qing court calling for a revolution. Interestingly enough for Macao, Sun is often presented as the first Chinese doctor to have practiced Western medicine in the territory at the end of the nineteenth century, thus importing foreign techniques to cure the Chinese body. Today, Hong Kong and Macao have returned to Chinese sovereignty, and there is no doubt that both SARs are thus Chinese, and yet because of their remarkable status, valid for 50 years, and a promise of political liberalisation contained in either the Basic Law or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the debate about what it means to be “patriotic” goes on. And again, the pace of change is at the root of the questioning.

Is it what legislators Sio Chi Wai and Zheng Anting had in mind when they went on a rant about patriotism during the first plenary session of the Macao Legislative Assembly on October 16th? Both of them heavily criticised the “Occupy Central” movement in Hong Kong, insisting on its illegality and the harm it is bringing to our sister SAR for itself, its people and because of the image it offers to the world. Mr Sio insisted on the role played by the Internet in distorting information and polarising young minds, thus easily bringing about distrust and dissatisfaction with the government because of too much eagerness for change. He remarked that the “one country, two systems” formula’s success in Macao owes much to the strict compliance with “the love for our nation and Macao” as “the social basis” of the SAR’s legal system. Mr Zheng went one step further, worried about similar brewing trouble in Macao, calling upon the government to further “patriotic education” and strictly apply the national security law adopted in February 2009.

Mr Sio’s position comes as no surprise. Being appointed by the Chief Executive, he is a defender of the orthodoxy. He is also the secretary of the second commission of the Assembly, the one responsible for introducing in May the now infamous perks bill that pushed some 20,000 people onto the street—mostly young and mobilised via social networks! In June, representing the interests of employers, Mr Sio made it very public that he was strongly against a significant amendment of the Labor Relations Law, especially regarding the ridiculously low capping of earnings for the calculation of compensation fees for laid-off employees—set for now at a maximum of MOP$14,000 a month… what an irony! In August, Mr Sio was also among the two legislators openly calling for a boycott of the civil referendum on universal suffrage jointly organised by pro-democratic groups. As far as Mr Zheng Anting is concerned, he was elected for the first time in 2013 as second on the list of Mr Mak Soi Kun, a widely recognised pro-Beijing supporter. Moreover, Mr Zheng serves as the vice-president of the Jiangmen Folks Association, the one group that openly defended the perks bill in May and even organised a “favorable” counter-parade that gathered some 1,000 people—mostly elderly though.

Winning young minds goes beyond incessant cant, half-veiled threats and blind acts of faith. Remember that Joshua Wong in Hong Kong started his activist career via his Facebook Scholarism group precisely out of concern about the introduction of patriotic education.

Published in Macau Daily Times, October 24th 2014.

Kapok: Hong Kong and us

The Occupy Central movement is, of course, about democracy and the rejection of the perceived National People’s Congress’ fool’s bargain of August 31st. The central authorities have decided that the nominating committee for the 2017 Chief Executive election would be identical in number and composition to the election committee of 2012, that any potential candidate would need an endorsement of at least 50% of that massively pro-Beijing committee to run, and that a maximum of 3 candidates would eventually enter the fray. In doing so, they were not only being extremely intransigent and blind to widely shared aspirations; the kind demonstrated by widespread support for the third motion of the June civic referendum. They have actually hollowed out the promise enshrined in article 45 of the Basic Law, which states that candidates should be nominated “in accordance with democratic procedures”. Prejudiced pre-screening is quite the contrary.
And yet, despite these actions and the unexpected release of the White Paper on Hong Kong in June, in which Beijing was ostensibly reaffirming its prevalent authority over the “high-degree of autonomy” enjoyed by the SAR and vilipending the influence of “outside forces”, Occupy Central organizers confided in early September that they expected no more than “a few thousand” participants when October 1st arrived. Is the abusive 46-hour detention of a 17-year old “repeating” accidental leader on September 26th solely responsible for the massive movement that is making its mark on Asia’s “World City”? Are the 87 canisters fired at the crowd on Sunday 28th and a viral video of a seemingly innocent passerby being pepper-sprayed at close range the unique triggers for a 200,000-strong crowd occupying three symbolic quarters of Asia’s financial and shopping capital? How can we explain the endurance of the movement, despite the apparent lack of leadership and the half-veiled threats appearing in the People’s Daily, as well as the growing adversarial sentiment among shopkeepers and the lower half of the white-collar class? Is it the extensive and global media coverage of an exceptionally innovative, self-disciplined and peaceful crusade, one enthusiastically undertaken by boisterous yet geeky-looking teenagers? Or the playful usage of slogans and symbols, borrowed from everyone from Lu Xun to John Lennon, and from May 4th 1919 to May 1968 and June 1989, combined with a versatile and persistent usage of social media? All of these elements may partially account for the impetus and the forcefulness of the “umbrella revolution”, and help to explain its twists and turns, but they do not add up to a sufficient explanation!
With the revelation on Wednesday that Chief Executive C.Y. Leung might have accepted HK$50 million from an Australian company over the past two years as  compensation for acting as the company’s “referee and adviser” back in 2011 arrives the latest—overly dramatic and amazingly coincidental—avatar of the deep-rooted, common thread that can actually explain this rebellious civic movement: trust. More precisely, it is a lack of faith in our own institutions and their gatekeepers. Beyond the initial suspicion about Leung being a communist in disguise, the very fact that the August NPC’s decision was based on a report formulated by the CE indicated an inability to convey to Beijing the underlying currents at work in society, and an unwillingness to shoulder responsibility for the benefit of the whole community. Earlier in May, former chief secretary Rafael Hui Si-yan stood accused of pocketing HK$35 million for being the “eyes and ears” in the government of the Kwok brothers, the two co-chairmen of Sun Hung Kai Properties Ltd, Asia’s largest real-estate developer. On September 23rd, three days before the arrest of Joshua Wong, the same Mr Hui had admitted to secretly receiving HK$11 million in 2007 from Liao Hui, then director of China’s Office for Hong Kong and Macao Affairs, simply to pursue his job and continue enjoying his lavish lifestyle. This is something his boss, former Chief Executive Donald Tsang, seemed to have emulated, despite his devout (if not frugal) Catholic faith. With an ICAC investigation on the move, C.Y. Leung is clearly on his way out. What got to him is not the allegedly naïve aspiration for democracy: it is the fact that he could not be trusted. Democracy comes later, when one realizes that only the “least worst” of the systems allows for corrective measures when leaders are exposed for incompetence and dishonesty. Article 45 is thus not a prerequisite, but a liberal setting is, and so is its attendant, “muckraking” press. Food for thought, on both sides of the delta.

Published in Macau Daily Times, October 10 2014.

Kapok: In praise of the vouchers

Let me be honest: at first I was more than doubtful about what I was reading, and one could even say that I started looking deeper into the matter with pretty self-assured and somehow offensive ulterior motives. Come on, how could this be? “A study concludes that healthcare vouchers have prevented 123 deaths a year,” read a headline, or in this very newspaper, a milder “Study: Medical Vouchers Prevented Fatalities, Should be Given to TNRs.” For those of you not aware of cross-feeding multilingual acronyms, “TNRs” means non-resident workers, as in the very elegant perfunctory statistical category derived from the Portuguese “trabalhadores não residentes”. So vouchers distributed by the government equal saving lives, and this should be indiscriminate when it comes to human life, hence the noble appeal to extend it to all the contributing participants to and of the community. When absolute efficiency meets generosity…
A scientific mind has a craving for heuristic (meaning that one is always trying to find causality) relations: what are the causes behind a phenomenon, and to what extent these causes alone can explain things. In social sciences, the real “hard sciences” as everything is more complex when one deals with human nature, single factor explanations are pretty rare to come by, and often follow rather cryptic statistical considerations in which the whole exercise consists in isolating factors and relating a dependent variable (in this case mortality because of a disease) with an independent one (the introduction of vouchers).
The press reports based on a Lusa dispatch insist on the main conclusion of Professor Zhang Jinghua’s study, that a 24 percent decrease in cardiovascular diseases recorded as of 2010, compared to the 2001-2009 period, can be directly connected to the introduction of medical vouchers back in 2009, resulting in the prevention of 123 deaths a year over 2010-2012 (the claimed drop in mortality, 0.22%, multiplied by an average of 560,000 residents over the period). And vouchers are here seen as having a direct influence on citizens scheduling health checks or taking medical exams that would have otherwise probably not been undertaken without this exclusive incentive.
My first reaction was not to go to the report but to international studies, especially one by the OECD that indicates that the main reasons behind the sharp decrease in cardiovascular disease mortality rates have to do foremost with the decline of tobacco consumption and also with the improvements in medical care—why would Macao be any different? Then, I went to the official statistics, and if it indeed shows a decline in mortality rates for “cardiovascular diseases” in recent years, it also indicates that the year with the least number of deaths because of cardiovascular issues was in 2007 and the mortality rate because of respiratory diseases has increased rather significantly—the number of deaths because of respiratory diseases used to be 1/3 of the one for cardiovascular diseases, now it is 2/3!
So I finally went directly to the source, and Professor Zhang’s study is indeed pretty comprehensive and compelling, taking into account a multiplicity of factors (medical resources—numbers of physicians, nurses and patient beds per thousand population and public healthcare expenditure, economic development level—GDP per capita, the human development index, population ageing factor, natural seasonal effects and long-term trends), scrutinising the yearly reports of the Macao Health Bureau (incidentally pointing out to the inefficiency of the awareness and educational campaigns) and even admitting to certain shortcomings in the lack of compelling statistics about cerebrovascular diseases or simply the rather limited consideration given to the improvement of medical care because of new technologies, better training and more efficient drug therapies. Ultimately, in its own words, the study merely “suggests a robust connection between the timing of the implementation of the Macao Medical Voucher Program and a significant decrease in the mortality from circulatory system diseases in Macao, but their causal relationship awaits confirmation in further research.” The mere fact that the cancer mortality rate has increased significantly over the same period—as indicated in the study—should have led to more caution in the media reports: I would bet my salary that the vouchers program, conversely, was not responsible for that!


Published in Macau Daily Times, September 19th 2014

Kapok: Hong Kong and us

The recent debate over universal suffrage for the 2017 election of the Chief Executive in Hong Kong, and the much anticipated ruling made by the National People’s Congress (NPC) last Sunday over the issue have proven both fascinating and, rather unfortunately, extremely worrying.
Fascinating because the political awareness demonstrated by the Hong Kong citizenry at large has become a key feature of the distinct identity of our sister SAR. This was not originally “a given”, and it became salient only back in 2002-2003 over the debate regarding article 23 and the appending national security law with the SARS outbreak as a backdrop. Social movements and unrests of some significance have quite a long history in Hong Kong, but then the triggering causes clearly used to intertwine anti-colonial sentiments and mainly labor issues with China’s own turmoil of the time, as exemplified by the massive riots of the 1920s and 1960s. The vast demonstrations in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre in June 1989 were already encompassing a wider array of the population, but the scale of the mobilization was commensurate with the emotional shock felt by many because of the blood-stained character of the repression, and then genuine feelings of solidarity with the victims precipitated growing fears about the future of Hong Kong itself after 1997. The 2003 events mark a turning point as they took place after the handover to Chinese sovereignty and mainly gathered white-collar and professional segments of society, along with their families, and thus exhume the coming of age of what political scientists characterize as a “vibrant civil society”, targeting the government for being too weak in its commitment to uphold “a high degree of autonomy” for the SAR. Since then, the “civility” of society has grown both in strength and scope, whether one considers attendance to the June 4th vigil in Victoria Park, the youth-led Scholarism movement against patriotic education, the Occupy Central movement and of course the civil referendum of June 2014.
The worrying side derives palpably from the inflexible stance adopted by the central authorities, as the NPC ruling completely excludes popular initiatives by requiring candidates for the 2017 elections to be endorsed by a majority vote casts in a non-elected 1,200-member nominating committee, and furthermore limits the number of candidates to two or three nominees. Quite a stark contrast with the winning motion of the civil referendum that garnered the acquiescence of more than 330,000 people for a “three-track” proposal (public, nominating committee and parties) to put forward candidates! For Michael Davis, professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, this constitutes a major betrayal of the spirit and letter of both the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Hong Kong Basic Law as it subverts completely the commitment to universal suffrage. In a very strong opinion published in the South China Morning Post on September 3rd, Prof. Davis further argues that not only does this ruling undermine the rule of law, but also infringes international law as it contradicts the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, of which Hong Kong is a signatory—article 25 of that Covenant provides every citizen the right “to vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage… guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors—, and furthermore contradicts the aim, as voiced out by Deng Xiaoping himself, for Hong Kong people to “put their hearts at ease”. For all these reasons, Prof. Davis concludes—without any risk of being sacked—that “democrats in the Legislative Council have no reason to support a bill under these constraints”.
What is there for us when Article 47 of our Macao Basic Law unmistakably lacks a straightforward commitment to universal suffrage? Well, first, this acts as a reminder that Macao is also a signatory of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [see art. 40 in the 3rd section of the MBL], and thus, if we follow the UN Human Rights Committee that interpret the Covenant, that not only suffrage should be “universal and equal” but that “persons entitled to vote have a free choice of candidates”. And then, we have the statement of Li Fei, the deputy secretary general of the standing committee of the NPC sent to Hong Kong to explain the ruling: “Only one person [candidate] does not make an election, but too many is not proper either” [一個人就不是選舉，但多了也不合適]. This constitutes a prompt recall that elections are chiefly about building trust, and thus Mr Chui’s commitment to further develop democracy in Macao, as stated in his 2014 platform, appears more pressing than one would have initially expected.

Published in Macau Daily Times, September 5th 2014

Kapok: The uniqueness of being only one

Elections get me excited, even when one has no real choice and the predictability of the outcome is no less than 100%. This is uncommon, I admit, as what fills people with enthusiasm during electoral events is the thrill of the contest, the uncertainty of the ultimate result despite the polls and the predictions, and of course the fact that any election is an exercise in power, the power of the one dropping her or his ballot in the box in order to decide upon her or his community’s future for the next four or five years. Elections in essence need to be contested; they suppose competition. In order for this competition to take place, differences have to be carved up, contrasts revealed, ideological stances spelled out, contradictory options openly expressed, alternative proposals debated, etc. More often than not, the infighting and bickering have more to do with ego and personal postures than with platforms, and yet this is a moment when the whole body of citizens gets hooked by the “affairs of the city”, the etymological meaning of politics. Macao people still remember very vividly the 2012 elections of the Chief Executive (CE) in Hong Kong: images of Henry Tang, often caricatured as a pig in the satirical press, blasting live on TV Leung Chun-ying, nicknamed the wolf by the same press, over his tough stand on civil liberties were gripping—and indeed the original front-runner ultimately lost the race to the challenger. The pro-democratic camp candidate, Albert Ho, who stood no chance of winning right from the start, was ultimately relegated to an even fainter secondary role, despite his many attempts to corner both pro-establishment candidates over their (lack of) commitment regarding universal suffrage. And the ultimate irony is that there was no real power of the people either, as the “election committee” was only made up of 1,200 members.
So, what can get me so excited about the present CE elections in Macao? Of course not the program of the unique candidate, which remarkably resembles its 2009 previous incarnation. Of course not the campaign itself, which consists of touring the ever supportive corporations aka traditional interests-associations and hearing patiently their very segmented grievances and proposals, as if they had not have ample time to express these during the past five legislative sessions, again missing the big picture of the overall interest of the community. No, what really fascinates me is the acquiescent abjuration of the most basic democratic values voiced out by some commentators. The argument goes like this: There is no alternative, this is the nature of the “other” system in Macao, and a contested CE election is the exception in our SAR, as it only happened once, back in 1999.
It is true that Hong Kong, in that respect, is quite the opposite as it experienced only two “exceptions” in 2002 and 2005, when Tung Chee Hwa and Donald Tsang respectively ran unopposed—a contested electoral process is thus the rule on the other side of the Pearl River. But what should be added is that these exceptions occurred at a time when our sister SAR went through its worst crisis of confidence ever—Tung indeed resigned before the end of his term, supposedly for health reasons. If we broaden the perspective to the world and google “elections with only one candidate”, what are the instances that we get? Yemen, Zimbabwe and North Korea… Let’s be honest, even “old democracies” fall victims of uncontested elections: in 2012, for example, some 40% of candidates ran uncontested in the state legislature elections in the United States, the highest percentage in 10 years. What kind of commentaries did that situation attract though? Acquiescence and fatalism or a genuine worry about the balance of power and the democratic outlook? Back in 2009 in Macao, there were talks of a possible challenger, the quite popular Prosecutor general Ho Chio-meng. 2009 was also a year during which many politically sensitive surveys and polls were conducted, thus giving the impression that public opinion was much more directly probed.
I partially agree with the idea that this time around what will really matter is foreseeably the new appointments and possibly the new structure of government that will be revealed at the end of December. Yet, with the challenge of the civic referendum looming, I guess it would have been a good idea for Mr Chui to at least bring the novelty of a live TV show, some kind of hybrid between a debate and a forum. Courage is indeed a component of political legitimacy.

Published in Macau Daily Times, August 22nd 2014