Booming Macao Belongs to Portugal, but Chinese Residents - and Peking - Call Tune
By Joseph Lelyveld - Special to The New York Times
Sept. 29, 1973
Macao, Sept. 22 — Portugal's minuscule outpost on the South China coast is experiencing its first economic boom in nearly three centuries, but the local Portugeese are cast in the role of bemused, even mournful bystanders.Macao is no longer Macao,” lamented an official in the shuttered Governor's office, a spacious colonial structure, whose facade has been washed in a delicate pink pastel inspired by the memory of some distant Iberian port.
The Talk of Macao
There was a time when all the buildings on the Praia Grande, the shaded waterfront avenue on which it stands, shared that same inspiration. Now many of them are being pulled down and replaced with nondescript apartment houses inspired by nothing but the promise of a fast return. The regrets the Portuguese feel for the old buildings and for a vanishing way of life is deepened by the fact that they will share in very little of those returns, for Macao's boom is almost purely a Chinese phenomenon.
Chinese Money Everywhere
Chinese capital is behind the apartment houses, just as it is behind the casinos, the fleet of hydrofoils that come skimming across the muddy Canton River estuary with gamblers and tourists from Hong Kong, the textile factories and impressive plans for further investment.
Part of the money is local; much of it comes from Hong Kong. Investors are confident because they believe that the Chinese Government in Peking has no plans to renounce the perpetual grant of six square miles that the Portuguese finally obtained from the Ching Dynasty in 1887—after they had already been here for 330 years. And they also know that Peking will not allow Portugal to exert what remains of her tattered authority.
In practical terms, this means that business and personal taxes will stay low and that it will remain a simple matter to shift profits out of the territory without ever entering them on the ledgers of a Portuguese bank. Portugal has no diplomatic relations with China, no leverage and no illusions, for China exhibited her control of the local population at the start of the Cultural Revolution in, 1966, when local Red Guards rioted.
Of the population of about 250,000, fewer than 7,500 are classified as Portuguese, and of those fewer than 1,000 are actually Portuguese from Europe. The rest are Macaenese — Portuguese‐speaking Eurasians who are said these days to be forsaking a distinctive patois and cuisine maintained for several hundred years.
After the centuries of Portuguese rule, few Chinese here know Portuguese, which is not even taught in their schools. Most Portuguese find it necessary, however, to know some Cantonese.
The spectacle of a captive colonial power, and a good investment climate based on the Cultural Revolution may seem anomalous, but there is nothing much new in the situation for the Portruguese, who have not really flourished here since 1685, when they lost their monopoly on trade with Canton.
Until the Opium War, the Ching Dynasty kept a mandarin in Macao to supervise the local population and exercise discreet veto power over colonial officials. Now that role is played by Ho Yin, a local capitalist who is chairman of the board of the Tai Fung Bank and a number of other enterprises, and a frequent visitor to Peking.
Mr. Ho and others who have been quietly entrusted with the task of exercising authority make sure that no organization hostile to the Chinese Government gets started here, that the Portuguese refrain from taking in refugees, that most secondary‐school students attend Communist ‐ sponsored schools; and that the local press carries no editorials critical of Chinese policies.
Accepted by Portuguese
“They have all the power,” the Portuguese say in acceptance of a fact too obvious to be belabored. As one official put it: “The Chinese know our number. They have only to lift up the phone and say, ‘We don't want you people there anymore’ Of course the next day we'd be gone. What else could we do?”
Probably the main reason that such a call has not been placed and is not likely to be —despite Peking's strong support of anti‐Portuguese movements in Africa—is that the ouster of the Portuguese would upset the equilibrium of the British colony of Hong Kong, which has a vital importance to China for commercial and banking reasons and also because it provides an avenue for communication with the overseas Chinese.
Having decided to allow Macao to maintain a separate existence, Peking seemingly has no choice but to allow it to prosper in the only way it can — by attracting capital from Hong Kong.
Much of the boom is founded on Hong Kong's laws against gambling. This year there will be more than 1.5 million visits to Macao by Chinese from Hong Kong, which has a population of only four million. The overwhelming majority are lured here solely by the six casinos, which never close.
By any standard, the gambling is ferocious. A few weeks ago a young Chinese man walked away from the baccarat table at the Lisboa Hotel after having won $234,000 in one sittin.g. As a result of such exploits, the Chinese managers of the gambling syndicate recently thought it prudent to reduce the maximum baccarat bet to $12,000.
The Lisboa sits on the Avenida do Dr. Oliveira Salazar and boasts among its dozen restaurants one called the Portas do Sol, where Portuguese fado music is performed nightly. But the suggestions of Portugal are as synthetic as they would be if the hotel had been set down in Las Vegas, its real inspiration.
A garish structure surfaced in golden tiles, the hotel is crowded by a large concrete sculpture that looks as if it was meant to suggest a helicopter landing on a giant artichoke; actually it is meant to suggest a roulette wheel, symbolic of the new Macao.
Virtually from the hotel's front door, a long concrete span stretches towards two thinly populated islands, Taipa and Coloane, which account for about half Macao's area. The bridge is due to be finished in the spring, and Chinese entrepreneurs are already lining up withiplans for an industrial park, a deepwater harbor, a new resort and, of course, another casino.
What is in it for the Portuguese? Financial officials say that Portugal's only direct expenses on Macao are the cost of the bridge, given as a development loan to be repaid with interest, and the $34,000 she contributes annually to the upkeep of the missionary schools.
Traditional Gifts
In return, they say, Macao sends to Portugal a $100,000 contribution for the upkeep of a botanical garden and a hospital for tropical diseases in Lisbon, a traditional extraction, it is said, from the country's “overseas provinces.”
Macao's trade with Portugal and her overseas territories is actually slipping. Not even 2 per cent of her imports comes from the sup posed mother country, which takes only 8 per cent of her exports.
But officials here all insist that the benefits of Macao to Portugal cannot be measured—that it is, as one put it, “cultural and moral“—a necessary piece of evidence that Portugal is grander than she appears to be on the map of Europe. “You have to be inside Portuguese tradition and history to understand,” said a Macaenese who ranks high in the administration.
Asked about Macao's prospects, this official replied with a slight shrug, “There is no logic in politics,” then drew what for him was the logical deduction. “Our future must be very bright,” he said.
