Raphael Lemkin
on Genocide
http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/
quarta-feira, 24 de outubro de 2012
Fome China 1958-1962
Chronicle Of History's Greatest Carnage
November 2012
Rebutting Mao's apologists: A queue at a soup kitchen
"A 41-year-old woman, Pan Suhua, in March 1960, dug up the body of her husband after he had committed suicide, and apart from cooking and eating his flesh, sold 5.875 kilograms of his bones as bear bones at 75 fen per kilogram."
"In the spring of 1960, a four-member family had been reduced to just the mother and her emaciated daughter. Driven to madness by starvation, the woman killed her daughter and cooked her flesh to eat, after which she became completely deranged and repeatedly cried out her daughter's name."
"When [the brigade leaders] went inside they saw something being cooked in a wok, and when they raised the lid they saw it was human flesh. The wok contained an arm that still had a hand attached, from which I could see that it had come from a child."
There is more. The fullest and most authoritative account ever published of the Great Leap Forward of 1958-62, the biggest manmade disaster in history, is not an easy read. Frank Dikötter's book Mao's Great Famine appeared in 2010 and was rightly awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize. Yang's conclusions are similar, though his approach is different, and concentration on the documented and on first-hand accounts enhances the impact. It is safe to say that you will never have read a book like it, or one that is more horrific.
First published in Chinese in Hong Kong in 2008 in two volumes, it was reprinted eight times in two years. The author's personal and professional credentials could not be bettered. He worked for many years as a senior journalist at the official Xinhua News Agency, allowing him to amass archival and first-hand oral material. He also has firsthand experience.
As a young man he saw his own father die of hunger in 1959. It is a measure of the psychological deformation of an entire society that Maoism produced, especially with regard to the family ("a historically produced phenomenon", in the Chairman's words, "that will be eliminated") that Yang, busy promoting the Great Leap in the Communist Youth League at the time of his father's death, did not blame the system. Only when the Chairman launched into his second murderous folly in the Cultural Revolution seven years later did he begin to understand.
The Great Leap was a frenzied lurch from socialism into Communism, conceived by the Chairman and spurred by his ambition to overtake Moscow as the leader of international Communism. Communism being the future, success in the Great Leap would place the Middle Kingdom, materially and politically, back at the centre of the world.
Hence the drive to expand and industrialise the towns in a matter of years. The swelling army of workers was to be fed by enforced procurements from peasants stripped of their livestock, tools and garden plots, conscripted into production teams and herded with their families into communal kitchens. The peasants disliked the communes and collectivisation was a colossal failure. With all personal incentives to production gone, as the towns ate more agricultural produce shrank dramatically.
Within a year and a half mass starvation began. Driven to desperation, and, in the worst areas, to cannibalism, some peasants attacked grain storage facilities, trains transporting food to towns, or Communist Party cadres whose numbers had been hugely increased and whose cruelty was at once highly imaginative and beyond imagination. Punishments for "right-deviationists" or "counter-revolutionaries"— often starving peasants — went beyond the usual criticism meetings and vicious beatings. One report spoke of cadres "driving pine needles into the gums, ‘lighting the celestial candle' (lighted embers forced into the mouth), branding the nipples, tearing out pubic hair, penetration of the genitals and being buried alive".
Yet as millions died or were driven to devour one another as the state-imposed famine continued, there was no mass revolt. Yang's explanation is that under Mao a combination of Soviet-style autocracy and Chinese despotism in 20th-century form produced a level of dread that "seeped into the nerves and blood, becoming part of the person's instinct for survival".
The atmosphere of terror was not confined to ordinary people. Ideologically-induced blindness and party loyalty ensured that it operated in the higher echelons too. Twenty years later Deng Xiaoping said: "During the Great Leap Forward, was it only Mao Zedong who was so fanatical and none of the rest of us? Neither Comrade Liu Shaoqi nor Comrade Zhou Enlai nor I opposed him."
The role of Zhou Enlai, to this day lionised in the West, was the most craven. After abjectly repenting for having warned the party against "rash advance" in 1956, the prime minister spent the rest of his career as Mao's faithful executive tool. In the Great Leap, a few brief murmurs of concern apart, he fell into line. "Once Mao's most powerful lieutenants debased themselves," Yang comments, "no one else would dare challenge his views." It follows that Zhou's personal responsibility for the calamity is enormous.
Liu Shaoqi, the country's president during the Great Leap, was initially even more enthusiastic than Zhou, especially about the attack on the family, but unlike the prime minister he later developed qualms. "History will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialised," he told Mao when the Chairman was forced to retreat in 1962.
Particularly unsavoury were the personal spats between Liu's wife Wang Guangmei and Mao's consort Jiang Qing: Jiang tried to sabotage the circulation of a speech by Wang implying criticism of her husband, and cried tears of rage after another by Liu himself: "After Stalin died Khrushchev made a secret report, and now you aren't even dead and someone is making an open report."
Liu's punishment was to be hounded to death in the Cultural Revolution. And it was Zhou, his comrade for many decades, who was to sign his condemnation — his death warrant, in effect — as "traitor, inside agent and scab". I don't recall Zhou's association with cannibalism featuring in John Adams's modish opera Nixon in China, where he emerges as a sagacious and conciliatory figure, the Wise Man from the East.
Yang's documentation of the facts is remorseless. The more leftist the provincial party boss, he establishes in pages of exhaustive tables, the greater the number of deaths. The western province of Sichuan, so productive it is called "Heaven's Pantry", suffered ten million dead from starvation, chiefly because its party chief was an unquestioning ultra, anxious to ingratiate himself with Mao. The starving millions ate rice straw, corn stalks, rats, sparrows, roots, tree bark, algae, egret droppings, insects, and in the last stages of desperation, clay or human flesh (30 cents per half kilogram).
The cynicism and brutal cunning of the Chairman emerge clearly. "Why aren't we being tough?" he said as the deaths piled up. "It's just a matter of having a little less pork for a time, or fewer hairpins and a shortage of soap." At the Lushan conference in 1959, when the disastrous effects of his dogma were already clear, delegates expected a retreat to be called. But Mao had things fixed. As in the Hundred Flowers period of 1956, he allowed the doubters to speak, then turned the meeting into an "anti-rightist" campaign, rather than one aimed at curbing the lunatic excesses of the Left.
The retreat came in 1962, when peasants regained garden plots and most communal kitchens closed. But that too was to prove tactical. The Cultural Revolution was a continuation of the Great Leap by other means, and it was then that Mao exacted revenge on his most courageous opponent at Lushan, defence minister Marshal Peng Dehuai.
Yang estimates the victims of the Great Leap at over 36 million, though he acknowledges that other sources, including an internal post-Mao report by the party itself, have come up with higher figures. As well as his scrupulous calculations about the numbers who died, Yang discusses the losses to the Chinese population as a whole through abortions or failure to conceive. In one district 60 per cent of women ceased menstruating, and 30 per cent suffered uterine collapse.
The scale of the ideologically inspired slaughter — some two-thirds of the population of Britain — is driven home. His figure for the dead, Yang points out, is similar to the number killed in the First World War, and almost as many as in the Second (40-50 million). Why has it taken so long for the enormity of Mao's carnage, and of his guilt, to emerge? The efficiency of Chinese censorship and repression is one reason. Another is the lack of photographic evidence, of the kind we have seen of Auschwitz. If there are no pictures, the modern mind reasons, can we be sure it ever happened?
Yet evidence of the disaster, if not of its scale, has been there for half a century. The numbers escaping from the mainland to Hong Kong at the risk of their lives shot up in the famine years, and as a diplomat in the early Sixties I remember reading reports of our interrogations of refugees recording the horrors of the Great Leap and the brutality of the cadres. Chinese journalists in Hong Kong were on to the refugees too, and told their stories, but in the West not too much was said. In this sense the hecatomb of the Great Leap is comparable to the Holocaust: anyone who wanted to know knew, but many did not.
Denials by sinologues, Maoist sympathisers or "friends of China", many on university campuses, helped to suppress the truth. The same people, or their ideological heirs (as a romantic, highly personalised creed, Maoism has taken on the force of myth, making it impervious to the facts, and so extraordinarily tenacious) will find ways to play down this book, as they did Frank Dikötter's. One is to continue to claim that the deaths were due in the main to natural calamities, a contention that Yang demolishes by detailed reference to the climatological facts of the time. Not even the Chinese Communist Party argues this any more, so not for the first time we have sinologues and leftist Western intellectuals who are more Maoist than the Chinese pope.
A final reason the truth has been long coming is racism. For Western apologists for Mao, China was frequently an abstraction, a plaything of the mind. Many had never been there. Unlike Europeans or Americans, the Chinese were not thought of as flesh and blood individuals, which made the lives of an over-abundant people expendable in the cause of an intellectual experiment.
Nor were our campus revolutionaries alone. Many a liberal-minded or even right-wing Westerner found and will go on finding excuses for the Great Helmsman's murder of tens of millions of his people. I recently heard of a banker who continues to shrug off the deaths with the comment that in a country that size they were soon replaced. Will the Great Leap Forward ever feature in history lessons in our schools, along with the ubiquitous Nazi studies? For reasons that are ultimately racial as much as political, I think not.
On the prospects for the future of his country, Yang is warily optimistic. Quoting Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, he warns that where ideas are concerned the crowd is always several generations behind, and that a genuine democracy in China will not come soon. Today all right-thinking folk want China to lunge forward to a full democracy, but Yang is not among them: "An overnight imposition of democracy combined with the radical actions of anarchists could cause a weak regime to lose its ability to control society and allow the emergence of a new dictator — because autocracy is the most effective means of restoring order out of chaos."
Wise words from a courageous man, who still lives in Beijing. His book is of course banned in China, yet, for all our complaints about it, Chinese censorship is not remotely what it was in the past, and like Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography of Mao, in time Yang's work will filter in and permeate the country's elites, the Communist Party included. The result, it must be hoped, will be to make any leap back to its poisoned past less likely.
quinta-feira, 18 de outubro de 2012
World Press Trends
World Press Trends: Newspaper Audience Rise, Digital Revenues Yet to Follow
http://www.wan-ifra.org/press-releases/2012/09/03/world-press-trends-newspaper-audience-rise-digital-revenues-yet-to-follow
From Gender Bias to Sex Selection
Summary
by Kate Gilles and Charlotte Feldman-Jacobs(October 2012) Every year, as a result of prenatal sex selection, 1.5 million girls around the world are missing at birth—it is as if the entire female population of Nairobi simply disappeared.1
This alarming trend is the result of a perfect storm of three phenomena: the underlying and deep-seated gender inequities that lead parents to value sons over daughters; a trend toward smaller families; and modern medical technologies that can determine fetal sex early and cheaply.
This brief focuses on the motivations and mechanisms behind the increase of prenatal sex selection; outlines regions and countries that have skewed sex ratios at birth; and explores the negative social, economic, and development effects on individuals, communities, societies, and countries. While prenatal sex selection was once thought to be unique to India and China, it actually threatens all regions where these three phenomena are converging. The practice now exists in other countries in South and East Asia as well as in eastern Europe, and could emerge in Africa in the not-too-distant future.2 Policymakers need to be aware of the practice's potential growth, and how it threatens gender equality and progress in their own countries. With increasingly accessible technologies paving the way for further expansion, now is the time to learn from interventions that have shown promise in exposing or stopping the practice of sex selection.
Imbalances in Sex Ratios at Birth
How do we know these girls are missing if they were never born? Under normal circumstances, about 102 to 107 male babies are born for every 100 female babies born. This is called the sex ratio at birth, or SRB.3 In the 1980s, SRBs in Asia, beginning with India and China, rose quickly and dramatically—many more boys and many fewer girls were being born than would be naturally expected. These skewed SRBs (which remained severely elevated even after adjusting for under-registration of female children) suggested that females were being intentionally eliminated before birth through prenatal sex selection.Since then, SRBs in the affected countries have remained high. In India, for example, ratios seem to be stabilizing in a few regions, but are continuing to rise in many others; and regions with previously normal SRBs are now seeing those levels increase.4 Moreover, ratios are rising in other countries in Central, South, and East Asia, as well as areas of the Caucasus and Balkans (see table). Only South Korea has managed to achieve a decrease from the elevated levels of the 1980s and now has a normal sex ratio at birth.5
Sex Ratio at Birth in the Most Affected Countries
| Country/Year | Sex Ratio at Birth |
| China (Mainland) (2009) | 118.1 |
| Azerbaijan (2009) | 117.6 |
| Armenia (2008) | 115.8 |
| Georgia (2006) | 111.9 |
| Montenegro (2005-09) | 111.6 |
| Albania (2008) | 111.5 |
| Vietnam (2010) | 111.2 |
| India (2006-08) | 110.6 |
| Pakistan (2007) | 109.9 |
Note: Sex ratio at birth (SRB) is the balance of male to female births, generally expressed as the number of male babies born for every 100 female babies born. The normal biologic range is 102-107 males born for every 100 females.
Source: Christophe Guilmoto, "Sex Imbalances at Birth: Trends, Consequences, and Policy Implications," accessed at www.unfpa.org, on May 30, 2012.
Source: Christophe Guilmoto, "Sex Imbalances at Birth: Trends, Consequences, and Policy Implications," accessed at www.unfpa.org, on May 30, 2012.
Kate Gilles is a policy analyst at the Population Reference Bureau. Charlotte Feldman-Jacobs is program director, Gender, at PRB.
References
- World Bank, World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011).
- World Health Organization, Preventing Gender-biased Sex Selection: An Interagency Statement. OHCHR, UNFPA, UNICEF, UN Women and WHO
http://www.prb.org/Publications/PolicyBriefs/sex-selection.aspx
terça-feira, 16 de outubro de 2012
Spielberg on the Sound of Close Encounters
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/10/15/steven_spielberg_breaks_down_the_sound_of_close_encounters_of_the_third.html?wpisrc=newsletter_rubric
If you try to imagine the typical big dramatic reveal from a Hollywood film, you’re likely to think of screams and roars and swelling orchestras. We see the dinosaurs, or the monster, or the Balrog for the first time, and if we’re sitting in the front row the brass will blow our hair back.
For Close Encounters of the Third Kind, however, Steven Spielberg decided to do something different. Like Alfred Hitchcock filming a terrifying attack scene in the middle of the day, Spielberg wanted to film his big reveal in an eerie silence. For the video below, critic and Slate contributor Tom Shone spoke to Spielberg about the sound design of that scene, when Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) first encounters a UFO. (He made the video for his students at NYU, but posted it on his blog over the weekend.) Spielberg tells Shone how he and sound editor Frank Warner scored the scene with almost complete silence—you literally hear crickets—to enhance the suspense and bring out all the “particulars” of the scene. Since they didn’t mix in booming timpani or a roaring engine, they could focus the audience on details: the clanking of nearby mailboxes, the hiss of the car engine overheating, a dog barking somewhere in the distance.
Spielberg says he was inspired by actual accounts of UFO sightings, which described ships flying overhead in total silence. And with a classic scene like this, some of the sounds come from the theater: Spielberg identifies the exact moment when the real soundtrack will be provided by the audience’s reaction.
If you try to imagine the typical big dramatic reveal from a Hollywood film, you’re likely to think of screams and roars and swelling orchestras. We see the dinosaurs, or the monster, or the Balrog for the first time, and if we’re sitting in the front row the brass will blow our hair back.
For Close Encounters of the Third Kind, however, Steven Spielberg decided to do something different. Like Alfred Hitchcock filming a terrifying attack scene in the middle of the day, Spielberg wanted to film his big reveal in an eerie silence. For the video below, critic and Slate contributor Tom Shone spoke to Spielberg about the sound design of that scene, when Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) first encounters a UFO. (He made the video for his students at NYU, but posted it on his blog over the weekend.) Spielberg tells Shone how he and sound editor Frank Warner scored the scene with almost complete silence—you literally hear crickets—to enhance the suspense and bring out all the “particulars” of the scene. Since they didn’t mix in booming timpani or a roaring engine, they could focus the audience on details: the clanking of nearby mailboxes, the hiss of the car engine overheating, a dog barking somewhere in the distance.
Spielberg says he was inspired by actual accounts of UFO sightings, which described ships flying overhead in total silence. And with a classic scene like this, some of the sounds come from the theater: Spielberg identifies the exact moment when the real soundtrack will be provided by the audience’s reaction.
sexta-feira, 12 de outubro de 2012
Coeficiente Gini
Measuring Inequality | ||
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A second definition of welfare which is often considered in analysis is that of ‘relative’ poverty, defined as having little in a specific dimension compared to other members of society. This concept is based on the idea that the way individuals or households perceive their position in society is an important aspect of their welfare. To a certain extent, the use of a relative poverty line in the previous sections does capture this dimension of welfare by classifying as ‘poor’ those who have less than some societal norm. The overall level of inequality in a country, region or population group – and more generally the distribution of consumption, income or other attributes – is also in itself an important dimension of welfare in that group. Inequality measures can be calculated for any distribution—not just for consumption, income or other monetary variables, but also for land and other continuous and cardinal variables. Some commonly used measures are presented in Technical Note: Inequality Measures and their Decompositions. For a discussion of the properties and qualities of alternative measures, please consult Inequality: Methods and Tools (177kb PDF), which presents the five key axioms which inequality are usually required to meet. The paper also discusses the calculation of standard errors for usual measures, which is useful for comparisons between estimates of inequality for different distributions.  Gini-coefficient of inequality: This is the most commonly used measure of inequality. The coefficient varies between 0, which reflects complete equality and 1, which indicates complete inequality (one person has all the income or consumption, all others have none). Graphically, the Gini coefficient can be easily represented by the area between the Lorenz curve and the line of equality.On the figure to the right, the Lorenz curve maps the cumulative income share on the vertical axis against the distribution of the population on the horizontal axis. In this example, 40 percent of the population obtains around 20 percent of total income. If each individual had the same income, or total equality, the income distribution curve would be the straight line in the graph – the line of total equality. The Gini coefficient is calculated as the area A divided by the sum of areas A and B. If income is distributed completely equally, then the Lorenz curve and the line of total equality are merged and the Gini coefficient is zero. If one individual receives all the income, the Lorenz curve would pass through the points (0,0), (100,0) and (100,100), and the surfaces A and B would be similar, leading to a value of one for the Gini-coefficient. It is sometimes argued that one of the disadvantages of the Gini coefficient is that it is not additive across groups, i.e. the total Gini of a society is not equal to the sum of the Ginis for its sub-groups. Theil-index: While less commonly used than the Gini coefficient, the Theil-index of inequality has the advantage of being additive across different subgroups or regions in the country. The Theil index, however, does not have a straightforward representation and lacks the appealing interpretation of the Gini coefficient. The Theil index is part of a larger family of measures referred to as the General Entropy class. Decile dispersion ratio: Also sometimes used is the decile dispersion ratio, which presents the ratio of the average consumption or income of the richest 10 percent of the population divided by the average income of the bottom 10 percent. This ratio can also be calculated for other percentiles (for instance, dividing the average consumption of the richest 5 percent – the 95th percentile – by that of the poorest 5 percent – the 5th percentile). This ratio is readily interpretable, by expressing the income of the rich as multiples of that of the poor. Share of income/consumption of the poorest x%: A disadvantage of both the Gini coefficients and the Theil indices is that they vary when the distribution varies, no matter if the change occurs at the top or at the bottom or in the middle (any transfer of income between two individuals has an impact on the indices, irrespective of whether it takes place among the rich, among the poor or between the rich and the poor). If a society is most concerned about the share of income of the people at the bottom, a better indicator may be a direct measure, such as the share of income that goes to the poorest 10 or 20 percent. Such a measure would not vary, for example, with changes in tax rates resulting in less disposable income for the top 20 percent at the advantage of the middle class rather than the poor. It is possible that different measures will rank the same set of distributions in different ways, because of their differing sensitivity to incomes in different parts of the distribution. When rankings are ambiguous, the alternative method of stochastic dominance can be applied. The attached paper Inequality: Methods and Tools (177kb PDF) discusses a type of stochastic dominance which can be used for unambiguous comparisons of inequality across distributions: the mean-normalized second-order dominance, or Lorenz dominance. | ||
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/EXTPA/0,,contentMDK:20238991~menuPK:492138~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:430367,00.html
terça-feira, 9 de outubro de 2012
Macau
Macau: um sorvedouro
Isidoro Guimarães
Poucos o recordam e até em Macau mal lhe sobrou uma rua, para os lados do velho Porto Interior, mas foi o governador Isidoro Guimarães quem, nos idos das décadas de 50 e 60 do século XIX, licenciou o jogo para sustentar o orçamento da Província de Macau, Timor e Solor.
Face à usurpação colonial de Hong Kong pelo Reino Unido, em 1842, a cidade do Santo Nome de Deus em vias de perder seus tratos comerciais no sul da China encontrou pela mão do futuro Visconde da Praia Grande de Macau uma nova vocação.
Da exploração pelos bandos tradicionais do submundo chinês, as tríades, até ao monopólio firmado com Stanley Ho em 1962, passando pela entrada em 2002 de competidores de Las Vegas, o jogo foi sempre - a par de contrabandos diversos, caso do auge do tráfico de ouro, após a guerra no Pacífico - a razão de ser de Macau onde à fruste administração portuguesa sucedeu a soberania de Pequim.
O esplendor do jogo
Regulamentar o jogo, velho vício chinês, encontrou logo na legislação de Isidoro Guimarães a sua justificação como fonte de receitas para projectos sociais e financiamento de infra-estruturas, e tal foi a lógica que levou das primeiras salas licenciadas no Porto Interior e na Rua da Felicidade aos esplendores dos actuais omnipresentes casinos que, superando desde 2006 as receitas de Las Vegas, contribuem para mais de 80% do orçamento da Região Administrativa Especial da República Popular da China, estabelecida em 1999.
Hoje, como desde os anos 60 do século pretérito, os casinos são a imagem de marca de Macau e qualquer miragem de diversificação económica, fantasiada pelos últimos governadores portugueses e outra vez reiterada pelo novel hierarca da Região, Chui Sai Hon, com beneplácito do presidente chinês Hu Jintao, perde-se insane.
Macau com pouco mais de 28 quilómetros quadrados no eixo da grande província de Guangdong, face aos primores de Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Zhuhai e Cantão, não apresenta quaisquer vantagens competitivas.
Raramente a especificidade de Macau foi potenciada, até por falta de quadros qualificados no funcionalismo público e escassez de oferta cultural, mas, mesmo a melhor das estratégias de promoção nunca poderia escapar à míngua do que ver.
Bastam, em regra, 24 horas para saciar um turista com o património arquitectural e culinário herdado das tradições luso-malaio-chinesas e impera a visita de curta duração visando os casinos.
Mais de metade dos visitantes de Macau, rondando quase dois milhões de entradas por mês, é oriunda da República Popular da China, que permitiu as visitas individuais ao seus cidadãos em 2003, e todos embicam aos casinos.
O fluxo de perdedores no jogo varia consoante as autorizações de entradas permitidas por Pequim e o volume de receitas segue de perto os altos e baixos da República Popular, sobretudo na vizinha província de Guangdong, pelo que os lucros dos casinos flutuam em função das entradas de jogadores da China.
A propaganda sugere que três mil milhões de apostadores asiáticos rondam por ali sôfregos por casinos num arco de cinco horas de voo, mas basta o mercado chinês que, subsidiariamente, é capaz de sustentar centros de jogo em Singapura, Coreia do Sul ou Camboja, para não deixar esgotar o maná de Macau.
Lavar dinheiro
E, no entanto, sobra um magno problema.
Nem tem a ver com a apatia política de uma população de pouco mais de meio milhão pessoas, maioritamente vinda da China, sequer, ainda, com reivindicações de justificada representação política por parte de grupos minoritários, clamando contra a crescente desigualdade social.
A representação política (de mediocridade assombrosa, conforme ilustram os debates ignaros na Assembleia Legislativa) deixa necessariamente de fora uma série de reivindicações sociais, apesar da crescente contestação ao emprego de emigrantes não-qualificados da China (cerca de 80 mil, segundo dados oficiais).
Os abusos perenes de corrupção (de que os governadores português, por sinal, nunca se penitenciaram) atingiram o auge no caso de um antigo governante, Ao Man Long, que, na tutela das Obras Públicas e Transportes, superou ao longo de sete anos abusos velhos, apropriando-se de quase 100 milhões de euros, até ter sido condenado em 2008 a 27 anos de prisão.
Ao Man Long e quatro familiares acabaram vítimas exemplares e solitárias de um sistema enraizado de compadrio e a prová-lo está a permanência da ex-auditora do governo, Fátima Choi, e do antigo Comissário Contra a Corrupção, Cheong U, em cargos governamentais com Chui Sai On, apesar de terem falhado em toda a linha no exercício das suas funções no executivo de Edmund Ho.
Nada disto importa sobremaneira a um Partido Comunista que, por exemplo, ainda no ano passado, deu luz verde a 18 anos de cadeia para o antigo homem forte de Xangai, Chen Liangyu, por razões (corrupção, tráfico de influências, etc.) que qualquer residente de Macau facilmente compreenderia.
A maior dúvida que sobra tem a ver com a forma como os dirigentes chineses irão nos próximos tempos lidar com os esquemas de lavagem de dinheiro que empresas e particulares da República Popular praticam assiduamente nos casinos de Macau quando se sabe que 90% dos grandes apostadores nos casinos são oriundos da China.
A fuga e a fraude via Macau terão necessariamente de encontrar os seus limites.
As autoridades de Pequim anunciaram este mês ter recuperado 1 500 milhões de dólares desviados só no último semestre por funcionários públicos e não é segredo para ninguém que parte significativa desse dinheiro seria cedo ou tarde reciclada através de Macau.
Jogar os yuans chineses para os trocar em dólares de Hong Kong ou patacas, livremente convertíveis, é coisa que se nota em excesso e não pode durar toda a vida.
Jornal de Negócios
24 Dezembro
Macau: um sorvedouro
Poucos o recordam e até em Macau mal lhe sobrou uma rua, para os lados do velho Porto Interior, mas foi o governador Isidoro Guimarães quem, nos idos das décadas de 50 e 60 do século XIX, licenciou o jogo para sustentar o orçamento da Província de Macau, Timor e Solor.
Face à usurpação colonial de Hong Kong pelo Reino Unido, em 1842, a cidade do Santo Nome de Deus em vias de perder seus tratos comerciais no sul da China encontrou pela mão do futuro Visconde da Praia Grande de Macau uma nova vocação.
Da exploração pelos bandos tradicionais do submundo chinês, as tríades, até ao monopólio firmado com Stanley Ho em 1962, passando pela entrada em 2002 de competidores de Las Vegas, o jogo foi sempre - a par de contrabandos diversos, caso do auge do tráfico de ouro, após a guerra no Pacífico - a razão de ser de Macau onde à fruste administração portuguesa sucedeu a soberania de Pequim.
O esplendor do jogo
Regulamentar o jogo, velho vício chinês, encontrou logo na legislação de Isidoro Guimarães a sua justificação como fonte de receitas para projectos sociais e financiamento de infra-estruturas, e tal foi a lógica que levou das primeiras salas licenciadas no Porto Interior e na Rua da Felicidade aos esplendores dos actuais omnipresentes casinos que, superando desde 2006 as receitas de Las Vegas, contribuem para mais de 80% do orçamento da Região Administrativa Especial da República Popular da China, estabelecida em 1999.
Hoje, como desde os anos 60 do século pretérito, os casinos são a imagem de marca de Macau e qualquer miragem de diversificação económica, fantasiada pelos últimos governadores portugueses e outra vez reiterada pelo novel hierarca da Região, Chui Sai Hon, com beneplácito do presidente chinês Hu Jintao, perde-se insane.
Macau com pouco mais de 28 quilómetros quadrados no eixo da grande província de Guangdong, face aos primores de Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Zhuhai e Cantão, não apresenta quaisquer vantagens competitivas.
Raramente a especificidade de Macau foi potenciada, até por falta de quadros qualificados no funcionalismo público e escassez de oferta cultural, mas, mesmo a melhor das estratégias de promoção nunca poderia escapar à míngua do que ver.
Bastam, em regra, 24 horas para saciar um turista com o património arquitectural e culinário herdado das tradições luso-malaio-chinesas e impera a visita de curta duração visando os casinos.
Mais de metade dos visitantes de Macau, rondando quase dois milhões de entradas por mês, é oriunda da República Popular da China, que permitiu as visitas individuais ao seus cidadãos em 2003, e todos embicam aos casinos.
O fluxo de perdedores no jogo varia consoante as autorizações de entradas permitidas por Pequim e o volume de receitas segue de perto os altos e baixos da República Popular, sobretudo na vizinha província de Guangdong, pelo que os lucros dos casinos flutuam em função das entradas de jogadores da China.
A propaganda sugere que três mil milhões de apostadores asiáticos rondam por ali sôfregos por casinos num arco de cinco horas de voo, mas basta o mercado chinês que, subsidiariamente, é capaz de sustentar centros de jogo em Singapura, Coreia do Sul ou Camboja, para não deixar esgotar o maná de Macau.
Lavar dinheiro
E, no entanto, sobra um magno problema.
Nem tem a ver com a apatia política de uma população de pouco mais de meio milhão pessoas, maioritamente vinda da China, sequer, ainda, com reivindicações de justificada representação política por parte de grupos minoritários, clamando contra a crescente desigualdade social.
A representação política (de mediocridade assombrosa, conforme ilustram os debates ignaros na Assembleia Legislativa) deixa necessariamente de fora uma série de reivindicações sociais, apesar da crescente contestação ao emprego de emigrantes não-qualificados da China (cerca de 80 mil, segundo dados oficiais).
Os abusos perenes de corrupção (de que os governadores português, por sinal, nunca se penitenciaram) atingiram o auge no caso de um antigo governante, Ao Man Long, que, na tutela das Obras Públicas e Transportes, superou ao longo de sete anos abusos velhos, apropriando-se de quase 100 milhões de euros, até ter sido condenado em 2008 a 27 anos de prisão.
Ao Man Long e quatro familiares acabaram vítimas exemplares e solitárias de um sistema enraizado de compadrio e a prová-lo está a permanência da ex-auditora do governo, Fátima Choi, e do antigo Comissário Contra a Corrupção, Cheong U, em cargos governamentais com Chui Sai On, apesar de terem falhado em toda a linha no exercício das suas funções no executivo de Edmund Ho.
Nada disto importa sobremaneira a um Partido Comunista que, por exemplo, ainda no ano passado, deu luz verde a 18 anos de cadeia para o antigo homem forte de Xangai, Chen Liangyu, por razões (corrupção, tráfico de influências, etc.) que qualquer residente de Macau facilmente compreenderia.
A maior dúvida que sobra tem a ver com a forma como os dirigentes chineses irão nos próximos tempos lidar com os esquemas de lavagem de dinheiro que empresas e particulares da República Popular praticam assiduamente nos casinos de Macau quando se sabe que 90% dos grandes apostadores nos casinos são oriundos da China.
A fuga e a fraude via Macau terão necessariamente de encontrar os seus limites.
As autoridades de Pequim anunciaram este mês ter recuperado 1 500 milhões de dólares desviados só no último semestre por funcionários públicos e não é segredo para ninguém que parte significativa desse dinheiro seria cedo ou tarde reciclada através de Macau.
Jogar os yuans chineses para os trocar em dólares de Hong Kong ou patacas, livremente convertíveis, é coisa que se nota em excesso e não pode durar toda a vida.
Jornal de Negócios
24 Dezembro
http://maneatsemper.blogspot.pt/2012/08/macau-um-sorvedouro.html
Rolling the Dice in Macau
http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=565
October 9, 2012
It has been almost a decade now since China regained control of Macau, but the city’s present and future crops up in news coverage much less than Hong Kong, another reclaimed colony. We’re delighted, then, to be able to run this piece about Macau from someone who has been spending time there, meditating on not only whether or not Macau is democratizing but also how Macau’s relationship to the mainland and the world is changing its economy and society. For those interested in background information on Macau, see the reading list that follows the piece.
By Dustin Wright
Sitting in a hip dessert shop recently, I asked three University of Macau undergraduates, all Macau natives, what they thought about Macau’s new Chief Executive-elect, Fernando Chui. He is only the second person to hold the post since the Portuguese handover in 1999.
“I don’t really think about it,” one told me. “Young people here don’t really think about who is in the government.” The two others nodded in agreement. “Connections are the most important thing to succeed in Macau. Anyone here who is rich was born rich.”
Such apathy can be understood, given that Chui’s appointment as the new head of Macau was decided by a 300-member “election committee” comprised of the city’s elite, many of whom have strong ties to PRC officials. Chui, the former Secretary of Social Affairs and Culture and holder of college degrees from the United States, including a PhD in Public Health from the University of Oklahoma, will be officially sworn in this December. The victory of his unopposed election was a foregone conclusion, emphasized by the fact that The Macau Daily lead with a headline declaring Chui’s victory before the vote actually took place. An online poll at the English language MacauNews.com showed that 44 percent of respondents felt that Chui’s top priority should be combating public corruption, while only 2.3 percent stressed the importance for political reforms. This strong displeasure towards corruption was likely exacerbated by a recent high-profile case involving a former official in Macau, now serving 28 years in prison.
However, not everyone is apathetic toward the election process. On election day, pro-democracy legislators unveiled banners and staged a protest in front of the iconic façade of St. Paul’s ruins, calling for universal suffrage by 2019. The rally hinted at the fact that political (and economic) disparities are just as Macanese as Portuguese egg tarts.
As with the changing of the guard in the Chief Executive’s office, the gaming sector might also be in a state of transition. For nearly four decades, the casino industry has been heavily influenced by one man, the philoprogenitive Stanley Ho, whose failing health has raised speculation as to who will make up (and benefit from) Macau’s next generation of corporatists.
All of this begs the question: What is the Macau that Chui will soon be running?
Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) is a city of variations, scattered with amalgamations, and permeated with assimilations. Since the sixteenth century, Macau’s seemingly effortless blending of cultures has impressed and marveled those who visited and inhabited this Portuguese outpost on the Pearl River Delta. “Culturally,” writes Austin Coates, “there has never been anything like Macao, where so much of China and so much of Europe are enshrined in one small place.”[1] Wang Zeng Yang, President of the Cultural Institute of Macau, remarked that this is a city “where different cultures are treated not as mere rituals, but instead, as truly symbiotic, as totally complimentary,” and that “even tourists in Taiwan advise their friends if they wish to know Europe but do not want to take long trips, to visit Macau, to know how it feels to be in a European city.”[2] At a very cosmopolitan and Iberian dinnertime of 10:00 p.m., you might find yourself dining on stewed bacalhau (Portuguese salted fish) and African chicken. At the same restaurant the previous night, it was mapo tofu, steamed Chinese broccoli drowned in oyster sauce, and eggplant sautéed in oil and chilies, washed down with milk tea.
Just as identity and cuisine are in constant motion in Macau, so is the movement of capital. Since the handover of Macau back to Chinese rule a decade ago, and the relaxation of monopolistic gaming licenses in 2002, foreign casino operators have set up shop at a dizzying pace. Macau peninsula—along with the islands of Taipa and Coloane—makes up only 29 square kilometers and often goes unnoticed when compared to the larger Hong Kong SAR. However, in terms of generating wealth, size doesn’t matter: Las Vegas is 7.5 times bigger than Macau, yet more money is generated in the SAR than Sin City.
Climbing up the hill to Guia Fortress, one of the many historical sites that pepper the peninsula, one can see much of Macau spread out below. Looking south, the Sands Macao Hotel, which is responsible for fully two thirds of Las Vegas Sands Corp.’s profit, fights for elbow room with a bevy of Chinese and foreign-owned casinos. Large condominium complexes are still being built within sight, though at a slower pace than this time last year. Fisherman’s Wharf, a Disneylandesque amusement park built in the images of famous landmarks and cities, including a mock Coliseum, sits atop 111,500 square meters of concrete along the waterfront. Even Isidoro Francisco Guimarães, governor of Macau from 1851 to 1863 and the first to introduce licensed gambling, could hardly have imagined the garishness of the city today.
To the west, towards the central business district of Macau, one can see the immense and lotus-shaped Grand Lisboa rising from a sea of comparatively diminutive casinos, along with banks, shopping malls, pastel-colored cathedrals, and apartment blocks. Nearby, a towering needle, complete with a rotating restaurant and bar, confirms Macau’s ascension as a tourist haven. Wynn Macau is visible, a casino as much as a high-end shopping bonanza for tourists, most of whom come from mainland China. An American expat working in Macau told me about his experience watching a man, who was half-naked and sweating profusely, struggle to fit into a shirt while standing in the middle of Wynn’s Giorgio Armani store. I asked why the store personnel would allow such behavior, to which the expat, shocked by my ignorance, replied without pause, “Because he had money.” (When Henry Kissinger came to Macau a few months ago to speak at Macao Polytechnic University, his old friend, Steve Wynn, made sure to come to listen and, perhaps, comped the former Secretary of State’s room at the Wynn Macau.)
On a clear day you can catch a glimpse of a smattering of islands to the east, the largest of which is Lantau, part of Hong Kong SAR, while to the north is the city of Zhuhai, gateway to Guangdong Province and mainland China, visible from much of Macau. Travelling between the SARs and the mainland ensures one’s passport is stamped with the frequency of a pre-EU jaunt through Europe.
It’s a small city, yes, but the numbers are big. Macau’s population is roughly 560,000, nearly identical to that of Las Vegas. With such a small land area, Macau is one of the mostly densely populated places on earth. Government figures indicate that 23 million people visited Macau in 2008 and helped the city generate nearly $22 billion in GDP. With so many visitors spending so much money, Macau is a city that truly never sleeps.
The massive expansion of Macau’s gaming industry dovetailed with the global real estate gorge of the last decade, giving way to a bevy of expensive condominium projects, followed by the subsequent drop in market prices late last year. In Senado Square, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a lodestone for tourists, the young professionals who bought many of those condos bark into Blackberries and loosen their European-brand ties, while tourist families vie for space to take their portraits in front of the picturesque St. Dominic’s Church. Macau’s overall standard of living is quite high, with a quality-of-life index comparable to Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
However, even with the huge influx of capital (or because of it), economic inequality is prevalent. Not far away from Senado Square, in an area known as Fátima Parish, lies a rusted and mosquito-infested slum, where elderly women can be seen washing dishes at a communal spigot. It isn’t a unique example of poverty in greater China, but it’s proximity to the corporatist wealth of the casinos makes the disparity all the more egregious. Inoperable cars sit on blocks as they are slowly parted out, while above, a messy labyrinth of wires indicates that much of electricity that people can access in this area is pirated. It is a squatter community of mostly mainland Chinese immigrants, some of whom entered Macau illegally but were later granted legal status. Until 1979, Chinese mainlanders could enter Macau without restriction, though it was illegal for them to do so under PRC law. Portuguese administrators tacitly endorsed the immigration of Chinese mainlanders, eager to have a ready supply of cheap labor that could be easily repatriated once their labor had been exploited.
Fatima Parish. Photo by Erica Hashiba.
The size of the slum has been halved since 1991, mostly through government campaigns to tear down the shacks and build high-rise housing and commercial buildings, evicting many of the squatters once their labor had been utilized to build the more expensive new real estate. Today, these towers loom over the shacks of corrugated tin that remain. Even though the slum is physically smaller and stronger immigration laws have made it more difficult for mainlanders to come to Macau, squatters are just as essential for today’s labor demands as they were twenty years ago. Sociologist D.Y. Yuan, a longtime researcher of Macau’s immigrant community, writes that, “Squatters have continuously provided a cheap source of labor, helping Macau to remain competitive in the international trade market.”[3] Last year’s census indicates that there was an increase of 8.2 percent in the number of “non-resident workers,” making up a population of over 92,000, many of whom have less than a junior high school education. Most of these workers are not salaried staff in the casinos (jobs which can require expensive training) but are instead employed in construction and more vulnerable to the global recession. When the economic crisis hit last fall, many ambitious building projects were shuttered and thousands in the construction industry lost their jobs. For those lucky enough to have kept their jobs in the casinos, gaming is still profitable, even though the number of tourists has decreased (due in part to travel restrictions by Beijing and the curtailing of gambling by PRC officials). Direct gaming tax revenue doubled from 2006 to 2008 to nearly $5 billion and many of the Macau government’s 20,000 employees can expect a pay raise this year. For the slums in Fátima Parish, things will likely remain the same.
The hotel Lan Kwai Fong. Photo by Erica Hashiba.
It remains to be seen whether Chief Executive-elect Chui will be able to oversee the level of prosperity heralded during the last decade, or indeed whether Macau can remain a global gambling Mecca. For some, surely, things could be worse. Down the street from my apartment, I recently happened upon the opening party for a new hotel. On the street where I stood, looking rather pathetic with my mouth agape, throngs of people queued for admittance, while glittery VIP couples seemed to prance in slow motion as they made their way to the front of the line. Up above us, the silhouettes of a dozen voluptuous women—paid performers—gyrated in the windows of the new hotel. A powerful sound system blasted Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” throughout the neighborhood, inviting all of Macau to find “someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares.” This fall, Dustin Wright will begin his doctoral studies in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Sitting in a hip dessert shop recently, I asked three University of Macau undergraduates, all Macau natives, what they thought about Macau’s new Chief Executive-elect, Fernando Chui. He is only the second person to hold the post since the Portuguese handover in 1999.
“I don’t really think about it,” one told me. “Young people here don’t really think about who is in the government.” The two others nodded in agreement. “Connections are the most important thing to succeed in Macau. Anyone here who is rich was born rich.”
Such apathy can be understood, given that Chui’s appointment as the new head of Macau was decided by a 300-member “election committee” comprised of the city’s elite, many of whom have strong ties to PRC officials. Chui, the former Secretary of Social Affairs and Culture and holder of college degrees from the United States, including a PhD in Public Health from the University of Oklahoma, will be officially sworn in this December. The victory of his unopposed election was a foregone conclusion, emphasized by the fact that The Macau Daily lead with a headline declaring Chui’s victory before the vote actually took place. An online poll at the English language MacauNews.com showed that 44 percent of respondents felt that Chui’s top priority should be combating public corruption, while only 2.3 percent stressed the importance for political reforms. This strong displeasure towards corruption was likely exacerbated by a recent high-profile case involving a former official in Macau, now serving 28 years in prison.
However, not everyone is apathetic toward the election process. On election day, pro-democracy legislators unveiled banners and staged a protest in front of the iconic façade of St. Paul’s ruins, calling for universal suffrage by 2019. The rally hinted at the fact that political (and economic) disparities are just as Macanese as Portuguese egg tarts.
As with the changing of the guard in the Chief Executive’s office, the gaming sector might also be in a state of transition. For nearly four decades, the casino industry has been heavily influenced by one man, the philoprogenitive Stanley Ho, whose failing health has raised speculation as to who will make up (and benefit from) Macau’s next generation of corporatists.
All of this begs the question: What is the Macau that Chui will soon be running?
Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) is a city of variations, scattered with amalgamations, and permeated with assimilations. Since the sixteenth century, Macau’s seemingly effortless blending of cultures has impressed and marveled those who visited and inhabited this Portuguese outpost on the Pearl River Delta. “Culturally,” writes Austin Coates, “there has never been anything like Macao, where so much of China and so much of Europe are enshrined in one small place.”[1] Wang Zeng Yang, President of the Cultural Institute of Macau, remarked that this is a city “where different cultures are treated not as mere rituals, but instead, as truly symbiotic, as totally complimentary,” and that “even tourists in Taiwan advise their friends if they wish to know Europe but do not want to take long trips, to visit Macau, to know how it feels to be in a European city.”[2] At a very cosmopolitan and Iberian dinnertime of 10:00 p.m., you might find yourself dining on stewed bacalhau (Portuguese salted fish) and African chicken. At the same restaurant the previous night, it was mapo tofu, steamed Chinese broccoli drowned in oyster sauce, and eggplant sautéed in oil and chilies, washed down with milk tea.
Just as identity and cuisine are in constant motion in Macau, so is the movement of capital. Since the handover of Macau back to Chinese rule a decade ago, and the relaxation of monopolistic gaming licenses in 2002, foreign casino operators have set up shop at a dizzying pace. Macau peninsula—along with the islands of Taipa and Coloane—makes up only 29 square kilometers and often goes unnoticed when compared to the larger Hong Kong SAR. However, in terms of generating wealth, size doesn’t matter: Las Vegas is 7.5 times bigger than Macau, yet more money is generated in the SAR than Sin City.
Climbing up the hill to Guia Fortress, one of the many historical sites that pepper the peninsula, one can see much of Macau spread out below. Looking south, the Sands Macao Hotel, which is responsible for fully two thirds of Las Vegas Sands Corp.’s profit, fights for elbow room with a bevy of Chinese and foreign-owned casinos. Large condominium complexes are still being built within sight, though at a slower pace than this time last year. Fisherman’s Wharf, a Disneylandesque amusement park built in the images of famous landmarks and cities, including a mock Coliseum, sits atop 111,500 square meters of concrete along the waterfront. Even Isidoro Francisco Guimarães, governor of Macau from 1851 to 1863 and the first to introduce licensed gambling, could hardly have imagined the garishness of the city today.
To the west, towards the central business district of Macau, one can see the immense and lotus-shaped Grand Lisboa rising from a sea of comparatively diminutive casinos, along with banks, shopping malls, pastel-colored cathedrals, and apartment blocks. Nearby, a towering needle, complete with a rotating restaurant and bar, confirms Macau’s ascension as a tourist haven. Wynn Macau is visible, a casino as much as a high-end shopping bonanza for tourists, most of whom come from mainland China. An American expat working in Macau told me about his experience watching a man, who was half-naked and sweating profusely, struggle to fit into a shirt while standing in the middle of Wynn’s Giorgio Armani store. I asked why the store personnel would allow such behavior, to which the expat, shocked by my ignorance, replied without pause, “Because he had money.” (When Henry Kissinger came to Macau a few months ago to speak at Macao Polytechnic University, his old friend, Steve Wynn, made sure to come to listen and, perhaps, comped the former Secretary of State’s room at the Wynn Macau.)
On a clear day you can catch a glimpse of a smattering of islands to the east, the largest of which is Lantau, part of Hong Kong SAR, while to the north is the city of Zhuhai, gateway to Guangdong Province and mainland China, visible from much of Macau. Travelling between the SARs and the mainland ensures one’s passport is stamped with the frequency of a pre-EU jaunt through Europe.
It’s a small city, yes, but the numbers are big. Macau’s population is roughly 560,000, nearly identical to that of Las Vegas. With such a small land area, Macau is one of the mostly densely populated places on earth. Government figures indicate that 23 million people visited Macau in 2008 and helped the city generate nearly $22 billion in GDP. With so many visitors spending so much money, Macau is a city that truly never sleeps.
The massive expansion of Macau’s gaming industry dovetailed with the global real estate gorge of the last decade, giving way to a bevy of expensive condominium projects, followed by the subsequent drop in market prices late last year. In Senado Square, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a lodestone for tourists, the young professionals who bought many of those condos bark into Blackberries and loosen their European-brand ties, while tourist families vie for space to take their portraits in front of the picturesque St. Dominic’s Church. Macau’s overall standard of living is quite high, with a quality-of-life index comparable to Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
However, even with the huge influx of capital (or because of it), economic inequality is prevalent. Not far away from Senado Square, in an area known as Fátima Parish, lies a rusted and mosquito-infested slum, where elderly women can be seen washing dishes at a communal spigot. It isn’t a unique example of poverty in greater China, but it’s proximity to the corporatist wealth of the casinos makes the disparity all the more egregious. Inoperable cars sit on blocks as they are slowly parted out, while above, a messy labyrinth of wires indicates that much of electricity that people can access in this area is pirated. It is a squatter community of mostly mainland Chinese immigrants, some of whom entered Macau illegally but were later granted legal status. Until 1979, Chinese mainlanders could enter Macau without restriction, though it was illegal for them to do so under PRC law. Portuguese administrators tacitly endorsed the immigration of Chinese mainlanders, eager to have a ready supply of cheap labor that could be easily repatriated once their labor had been exploited.
The size of the slum has been halved since 1991, mostly through government campaigns to tear down the shacks and build high-rise housing and commercial buildings, evicting many of the squatters once their labor had been utilized to build the more expensive new real estate. Today, these towers loom over the shacks of corrugated tin that remain. Even though the slum is physically smaller and stronger immigration laws have made it more difficult for mainlanders to come to Macau, squatters are just as essential for today’s labor demands as they were twenty years ago. Sociologist D.Y. Yuan, a longtime researcher of Macau’s immigrant community, writes that, “Squatters have continuously provided a cheap source of labor, helping Macau to remain competitive in the international trade market.”[3] Last year’s census indicates that there was an increase of 8.2 percent in the number of “non-resident workers,” making up a population of over 92,000, many of whom have less than a junior high school education. Most of these workers are not salaried staff in the casinos (jobs which can require expensive training) but are instead employed in construction and more vulnerable to the global recession. When the economic crisis hit last fall, many ambitious building projects were shuttered and thousands in the construction industry lost their jobs. For those lucky enough to have kept their jobs in the casinos, gaming is still profitable, even though the number of tourists has decreased (due in part to travel restrictions by Beijing and the curtailing of gambling by PRC officials). Direct gaming tax revenue doubled from 2006 to 2008 to nearly $5 billion and many of the Macau government’s 20,000 employees can expect a pay raise this year. For the slums in Fátima Parish, things will likely remain the same.
It remains to be seen whether Chief Executive-elect Chui will be able to oversee the level of prosperity heralded during the last decade, or indeed whether Macau can remain a global gambling Mecca. For some, surely, things could be worse. Down the street from my apartment, I recently happened upon the opening party for a new hotel. On the street where I stood, looking rather pathetic with my mouth agape, throngs of people queued for admittance, while glittery VIP couples seemed to prance in slow motion as they made their way to the front of the line. Up above us, the silhouettes of a dozen voluptuous women—paid performers—gyrated in the windows of the new hotel. A powerful sound system blasted Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” throughout the neighborhood, inviting all of Macau to find “someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares.” This fall, Dustin Wright will begin his doctoral studies in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Recommended readings on Macau:
Lucky for us, Hong Kong University Press just republished many of Austin Coates’ informative and immensely enjoyable books on Macau: City of Broken Promises (fiction), A Macao Narrative, and Macao and the British: 1637-1842 Prelude to Hong Kong.
For a general background on Macau, check out Jonathan Porter’s Macau : The Imaginary City : Culture and Society, 1577 to Present (Westview Press, 1999).
Cathryn H. Clayton, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii and a prominent scholar on Macau, has written the forthcoming Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness (Harvard University Press, 2009).
Atlantic correspondent James Fallows’ take on Macau.
César Guillén Nuñez, art historian and Research Fellow at the Macau-based Ricci Institute, recently wrote a wonderful book entitled, Macao’s Church of Saint Paul: A Glimmer of the Baroque in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2009).
For a general background on Macau, check out Jonathan Porter’s Macau : The Imaginary City : Culture and Society, 1577 to Present (Westview Press, 1999).
Cathryn H. Clayton, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii and a prominent scholar on Macau, has written the forthcoming Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness (Harvard University Press, 2009).
Atlantic correspondent James Fallows’ take on Macau.
César Guillén Nuñez, art historian and Research Fellow at the Macau-based Ricci Institute, recently wrote a wonderful book entitled, Macao’s Church of Saint Paul: A Glimmer of the Baroque in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2009).
[1] Austin Coates, A Macau Narrative (Hong Kong: Heinemann Education Books [Asia] Ltd, 1978), p. 105.
[2] Wang Zeng Yang, “Unveiling a Cultural Dialogue,” in Lucy M. Cohen and Iêda Siquera Wiarda (eds.), Macau: Cultural Dialogue Towards a New Millennium (USA: Xlibris Corporation, 2004), p. 17.
[3] D. Y. Yuan, Chinese Immigration and Emigration: A Population Study of Macau (University of Macau, 2000), p. 11.
[2] Wang Zeng Yang, “Unveiling a Cultural Dialogue,” in Lucy M. Cohen and Iêda Siquera Wiarda (eds.), Macau: Cultural Dialogue Towards a New Millennium (USA: Xlibris Corporation, 2004), p. 17.
[3] D. Y. Yuan, Chinese Immigration and Emigration: A Population Study of Macau (University of Macau, 2000), p. 11.
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