Kapok: The old regime

If Hong Kong did indeed host “China’s largest 25th anniversary Tiananmen remembrance rally” on June 4th, it was not, contrary to the South China Morning Post's headline, the “only” one on Chinese soil, and nor was it its first ever installment on the southern bank of the Pearl River. What was new though was the fact that it gathered more than 2,000 people in Macao, people who were on the steps of Saint Paul’s façade already in 1989 to demonstrate their dismay in the wake of the repression as well as younger participants, not even born at that time, concurring in the same aspiration to see the official verdict of “counter-revolutionary riot” be reversed. Desires to rectify the master narratives of historical events that are perceived as having been vastly distorted by an official truth are awfully enduring in any human community, and quite understandably so as this is the condition for collective memories to be soothed and united again.

Even though the figures seem pale in comparison with the 180,000 who amassed in Victoria Park on Wednesday evening, the very fact that more than 10 times the usual number of participants assembled in Senado Square, right in the middle of it, next to the fountain and up to the entrance of a popular cosmetics shop, is worthy of careful consideration.
Regarding the location, organizers of the event benefitted from two sets of distinct and yet converging factors: the cancelling of the traditional extravaganza celebrating “Children’s Day” because of the official mourning of one of Macao’s greatest Chinese patriots passing away, and two rulings of the Court of Final Appeal stating that not only did associations organizing the vigil have every right to apply for Senado Square but that the Public Security Police had no ground in deciding to restrict the vigil to the traditional small corner of Senado Square facing Saint Dominic’s Church.

As far as numbers are concerned, it is of course tricky to decide whether the importance of the turnout was mainly due to the particular significance of the 25th anniversary or to a broader social context that had seen some 20,000 Macao citizens, often very young ones, demonstrate on May 25th and again 7,000 on May 27th against a perceivably unjustifiable bill setting in place very generous packages for retiring officials along with unwarranted criminal immunity for the Chief Executive. If one looks at the past for an indication, it is true that the 20th anniversary did mark in Hong Kong a three fold increase between 2008—less than 50,000 people—and 2009—about 150,000. But for Macao, as far as one can remember, there was no such upsurge, as participants back in 2009 were in the 2 to 300, only marginally more numerous than in 2008. Thus, the constant references made by some of the organizers in Macao to the May 25th/27th demonstrations must not be taken lightly, as it is unquestionable that the 2014 June 4th vigil in Macao appears, if not yet as a turning point, at least as a landmark.

Party leaders in China, and especially Wang Qishan, the Politburo Standing Committee member in charge of Party discipline, are reportedly great readers of Tocqueville’s "The Old Regime and the Revolution" and have stressed the paradox that revolutions do not happen when things are worse, but rather when things have just started to change, thus making the need for deeper and yet incremental reforms somehow imperative if unnecessarily violent turmoil is to be avoided. Even if the China Daily says so.

Published in Macau Daily Times, June 6th 2014

Kapok: What happens in Macao… doesn’t stay in Macao

The newly revised bill soon to be introduced for a plenary vote at the Legislative Assembly that deals with the benefits granted to the Chief Executive (CE) and the principal officials (the five secretaries, the two commissioners, and the heads of the police and customs) upon leaving their office is creating quite a stir in the community and beyond. The main arguments of the opponents of the bill revolve around three sets of questions: its adequacy with the Basic Law; the amount of these benefits; and issues pertaining to procedural decision-making—in plain English, the absence of a public consultation regarding the matter. But the dispute has now spread beyond the legislative hemicycle: a petition asking for citizens to express their disagreement is claiming several thousand signatures; a Facebook page adorned with a picture of a pig and entitled “Greedy officials’ severance benefits are really excessive” has attracted hundreds of postings, close to 1,500 Likes and been shared more than 1,100 times; and the news has appeared and even made the front page, on May 21st, of the most widely-read Chinese newspaper in Hong Kong, the reputedly pro-Beijing leftist and yet grassroots-oriented Oriental Daily News—one of the titles raising the question whether Macao legislators had paved the way for the creation of a “third system”.
As far as the Basic Law is concerned, the main squabble has to do with the article related to the criminal immunity of the CE, also encapsulated in the bill, and the fact that this would contradict the principle of equality among citizens enshrined in our mini-constitution, especially because the “presidential immunity” that exists in many a place precisely concerns heads of state or prime ministers, whereas the CE can merely be considered has a “super province governor”. Yet, I beg to disagree: one cannot advocate the uniqueness of the second system all year long, and nevertheless diminish the status of the CE: our CE acts and symbolizes our whole political community, and the Basic Law is our constitution. What is missing though are possible derogations in order to waive this immunity, especially vested in the legislature, in case the CE commits acts that can be construed as incompatible with his responsibilities.
In principle, I personally believe and this is the case in many polities around the world, that the highest authority of a community should be entitled to life-long benefits upon retirement from official duty, at least for the sake of integrity and independence of the person who has embodied the whole community, and ultimately because he or she will never cease to represent this community. All benefits in nature (a car with a driver, a guard and an office) seem logical, and of course a revenue has to be included. What has now been decided, retroactively up to the year 2000, is to provide a revenue equivalent to 70% of the CE's monthly remuneration, and this for as long as he or she does not receive a salary from private employment. This corresponds to about MOP189,000 per month—a pretty comfy retirement scheme (a former French president, by comparison, makes MOP57,000 a month). Principal officials would get a one-time lump sum as severance benefit equivalent to 30% of a monthly salary times the number of months in service if not returning to the public sector and only 14% if returning to the public sector. Therefore, a secretary who has served ten years would receive MOP6,743,000 upon leaving office if not returning to the public sector—this is equivalent to 3 years of full salary, whereas, again in France, a former minister will only collect his full salary for 6 months. The amounts are thus pretty impressive, and the timing of the law quite tactless, as the salaries of the CE and principal officials have just increased by 10% in January and the whole administration is lined-up for an important reshuffle at the end of the year.
Would a public consultation help quiet down a growing public anxiety, as advocated by opposition legislators? Possibly, as the matter would at least be opened for discussion. But most surely, what would make a difference is if the president of the legislative commission responsible for the bill could come up with a better explanation than the one openly admitting that amounts and percentages were decided in a “non-scientific” way and because they seemed right. What would also help is if a CE-picked legislator would refrain from declaring that the principal officials even deserve “50%”, instead of the 30% already bumped up from the original 14%. Small circle politics has to be played with sophistication if it vies to elude embarrassment.

Published in Macau Daily Times, May 26th 2014

Kapok: Swift and resolute

The recently dismissed mayor of Bogota, Gustavo Petro, was absolutely right when he stated that “a developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.” I am pretty sure our neighbors in Hong Kong, having just been listed ‘best city in the world for commuters’, would beg to disagree: indeed developed countries can have it all—nice cars for those who can afford them and great public transportations for everybody—it just comes at a price.
If Hong Kong tops the list of the 84 cities assessed in the “The Future of Urban Mobility 2.0”, it still underachieves when it comes to the development of cycling paths and is clearly not faring well as far as air quality indicators are concerned. And yet, even in the first installation of the very same report produced by consulting firm Arthur D. Little in 2011, Hong Kong was already No. 1 and its success was seen as resulting from “a well-balanced split between different forms of transport that move people away from individualized motorized transport”—the Octopus card, owned at the time by 95% of citizens, was being deemed the cornerstone of a “well-articulated mobility strategy”. 
In 2014 the wording has grown stronger: Hong Kong is now doted with “the most advanced urban mobility system in the world.” Among the key elements of that system: public transport represents 64% of the modal split; the number of vehicles registered per capita is among the lowest amongst the cities surveyed; and the average number of smart cards per citizen reaches 3.1! Residents often own two cards, whereas both cross-border commuters and tourists alike are strongly encouraged to get one. When it comes to “green” drawbacks, things have obviously deteriorated since 2011, apart from cycling paths: transport-related CO2 emissions have doubled in just three years! Hence the adoption of the resolute and ambitious “Clean Air Plan” in March 2013, clearly a pre-condition for cycling paths to be rolled out beyond the New Territories…
What about Macao? 
In a previous column, I already stressed the inadequacy of the yearly assessment provided by the Transport Department (DSAT) regarding the setting in motion of the “General Policy on Traffic and Land Transportation in Macao (2010-2020)”—which, back in 2009, lucidly identified the main issues while making some far-reaching, although not mandatory, recommendations. To put it simply, the DSAT report can hardly hide that “too little” is done and “too slow”. Key statistics, like the share of public transport in the modal split, the penetration of smart cards or the cars per capita ratio are simply absent—despite some of these indicators being used in the 2009 consultation document. 
The criteria delineated by the Arthur D. Little survey could therefore be of interest: all together, it is some 19 factors divided between “maturity” and “performance” elements that allow for a fruitful comparative perspective. On the “maturity” side, only 2 out of 12 criteria seem to bode well in favor of Macao: the low public transportation fare and the frequency of the busiest transportation lines. But road density is about 7 times more than in Hong Kong and the number of cars per capita at least 2 times more, even if we exclude the 2-wheelers. On the side of “performance”, hardly any criteria seem to have improved based on measurements available in Macao: air indicators are deteriorating; traffic-related fatalities are worsening; the evolution of the share of public transport or zero-emissions means in the modal split are marginally positive; and the mean travel time to work has clearly gotten worse. 
While waiting for the LRT to be completed, swift and resolute action seems needed. Even though the “how(s)” would require undoubtedly more than a column to explore, redesigning bus routes and operations might prove useful, while making a better integrated usage of the Macau Pass could help—all parking meters in Hong Kong have been Octopus friendly since 2004. But first things first: let’s improve the assessment criteria!

Published in Macau Daily Times on April 18 2014

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: What happens in…

As is often the case with sayings, their actual meaning is commonly debatable and easily twisted by the interest and the context of the moment. Such is the case with “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, that pulls together two sets of meanings. On the one hand, related to permissiveness and secrecy—you can engage in anything borderline in Vegas, but whatever you do out there will not spill over Vegas’s vicinity—and on the other, connected to absolute otherness—this is only possible in Vegas. Apart from the fact that this sin-charged marketing motto strikes a particular cord for us in Macao, this is the expression that popped into my mind while reading reports about recent declarations made in Beijing by Peter Lee Ka-kit, Hong Kong-based Henderson Land Development’s vice chairman, in which he stated that “polls” conducted by University of Hong Kong’s Public Opinion Programme were “biased” against the pro-establishment/pro-Beijing camp in the SAR. He went on namely to target the programme’s director, Robert Chung, by questioning the scientific character of the polls and came up with a “pragmatic” solution according to which a selected few trade associations, naturally pro-establishment, would start funding alternative polls that would be conducted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the two competitors of Mr. Chung’s institution among the top tier universities in our sister SAR. Very pragmatic indeed, as any businessman should be: if you are not happy with a supplier, just go to another one! 
These remarks were made in Beijing during a meeting held on the fringe of the annual ten-day-long annual full session of the National People’s Congress (NPC) between delegates from Hong Kong and Macao to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), of which Peter Lee is a member of the standing committee, and NPC chairman Zhang Dejiang. Let’s just recall that this annual meeting of the NPC is the only moment of the year when the supervisory power of this otherwise rubber-stamp assembly can somehow frailly glow—the government’s budget is always approved, but sometimes only by 80% of the members!—and that the CPPCC, in itself a purely advisory body, is supposed to help engage in “political consultation” with and perform “democratic supervision” of the Communist Party. In theory, members of the CPPCC can thus be expected to display some kind of innovative thinking that can help the Party better itself. In practice, it is far too often the occasion for prominent exemplary citizens to exhibit their absolute submission to the current Party line. Journalists in Beijing noted that Peter Lee’s remarks along with the ones made by another tycoon’s progeny, Victor Li Tzar-kuoi (son of Asia’s richest man, Li Ka-shing, and also a CPPCC standing committee member) characterizing the Occupy Central movement as being contrary to Hong Kong’s core values, were made just hours after a high-level official from the central government liaison office had urged Hong Kong members of the CPPCC to speak more openly against Occupy Central.
That leads me back to my saying, this time with a local flavor: let’s hope that what happens in Beijing stays in Beijing, even though this doesn’t bode well for much needed political reforms in the first system. But can it really be so? What is there to gain, apart from radicalization, in adding worries over academic freedom to nagging questioning about threats to the freedom of the press in our neighboring SAR? And then, will what happens in Hong Kong stay in Hong Kong? On one side, we have businessmen suggesting the government “dissolve the people and elect another,” to echo Bertold Brecht’s famous verse, and on the other side we are expected to remain impervious to menaces growing on our doorstep. But of course, in Macao, we seem to be content with the simple fact that Mr Chui has finally ended the excruciating speculations about his candidacy for a second mandate and we have our own businessmen suggesting that legislators should simply forfeit their right to legislative initiative. Nothing to worry about, really.

Published in Macau Daily Times, March 7 2014