BOOK REVIEWS

A Question of Sovereignty

Macau, the first European possession in China, will become the last to return to the Chinese fold after 443 years of occupation by Portugal at the end of 1999. For at least the last couple of decades this impending event has assumed a sense of historical inevitability, bringing symbolic closure to the epoch of European expansion around the globe that so much dominated the last half of the closing millennium. Yet the necessity of Macau’s return has been largely taken for granted as the inevitable and natural outcome of some process such as “decolonisation” or national unification of “Greater China” (1).

The obvious but inadequate explanation for Macau’s return is that in 1987 China and Portugal signed the Joint Declaration on the Question of Macau designating December 20th 1999 as the date on which China would resume the exercise of sovereignty over Macau. The prior negotiation of Hong Kong’s return established the precedent. But why must Macau, following the path taken by Hong Kong, inevitably return to China? Macau, after all, for more than the last 100 years a poor and neglected place largely bypassed by the major movements of the twentieth century, was not the rich prize that Hong Kong presented. Twice, in 1967 and 1974, Portugal offered to return the territory to China, but its offers were rejected each time (2). In the contrasting case of Hong Kong, Great Britain was subject to the legal deadline imposed by the 99-year leasehold on the New Territories, signed in 1898, which would expire in 1997. China indicated that it had no intention of extending the lease, and the territories of Hong Kong and Kowloon, though ceded in perpetuity to Great Britain by China in 1842 and 1860, respectively, would not be economically and politically viable if detached from the New Territories. Besides, China viewed the treaties of 1842 and 1860, dictated by Great Britain following China’s ignominious defeat in the Opium War, as “unequal” treaties that it signed under duress. Because they were therefore illegal and invalid, China consistently argued that it was not bound by the treaties or by the lease on the New Territories that depended on the treaties’ validity (3). No such deadline ever applied to Macau, which was neither formally ceded by China nor leased for a specified term to Portugal—its legal status under international law was in limbo (4). This article examines some of the fundamental issues that have driven Macau’s imminent end-of-the-century reversion to Chinese control, with a view to understanding some of its broader historical and political implications, in particular the question of sovereignty.

Macau and China since 1949: a changing relationship

At the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, Macau had become a de facto colony of Portugal, largely due to the default of China since the late nineteenth century to resist Portugal’s efforts to assert sovereignty over the territory. Macau at this time was a derelict of the previous century, an antiquated “weed from Catholic Europe” where “nothing serious can happen” (5), a city of vice surviving on the manufacture of matches and fireworks. In 1962 the consolidation of gambling under a single syndicate, Sociedade de Turismo e Diversoes de Macau (STDM), marked the beginning of the revival of Macau as a tourist attraction and its slow economic recovery. Meanwhile, refugees from the mainland flooded into the city. In 1949 the population was probably well under 100,000, but by 1960 it stood at 161,000. By 1965 it reached 250,000, and by 1980 it was over 320,000 (6).

China’s “liberation” had no immediate effect on Macau’s status. Isolated diplomatically from all but the communist world and devastated by a long civil war, China focussed inwards on land reform, modernisation, and the social revolution. In 1958 it suffered catastrophic economic losses as a result of the ill-conceived reform policies of the Great Leap Forward (7). After only a partial recovery, China was then gripped in the throes of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. China’s international engagements in this period were sporadic and mainly limited to confrontations along its borders: Entry into the Korean War in 1950, the Geneva Conference in 1954, war with India in 1962, border clashes with the Soviet Union in 1969 and war with Vietnam in 1979.

Only after 1979, when China abandoned the course of mobilisational politics and turned to new economic policies under Deng Xiaoping, and the United States and China normalised relations, was China no longer isolated and introverted, and began to look outwards. Deng opened the door to foreign investments, and four Special Economic Zones (SEZs) facing the rapidly developing economic periphery of South China were created in 1979. It was significant that one of these, Zhuhai, faced Macau. The territory was now changing rapidly, infused with earnings from light manufacturing, gambling and tourism, and financial investment from Hong Kong. The city was exchanging somnolence and decay for economic vitality. The population, inflated by refugees and immigrants, continued to swell. From around 320,000 in 1979 it rose in the next two decades to almost 500,000. The following table shows population growth since 1980 (8). Official or de jure figures are often considerably lower than unofficial estimates, although there are notable anomalies in the reporting of population statistics.

In the three decades from 1949 to 1979, the effective relationship between Macau and China changed in fundamental ways. China emerged from a long series of economic setbacks and its international status as a pariah state to become a rapidly developing economy seeking trade, investment, and technology to fuel its economic growth. Macau, in the same period, was transformed into an exporter to world markets and an economic adjunct of Hong Kong, offering comparable access to foreign capital and commercial relations. Moreover, it was no longer a forgotten European colonial backwater but an overwhelmingly Chinese city. Aside from nationalistic nostalgia for a reunified China, Macau clearly assumed a new importance in relation to a Greater Chinese economic community. In the two decades since 1979 Macau’s transformation has continued on the same upward trajectory, although by 1995 economic growth had levelled off (9). In a rush of ambitious projects that have often exceeded the demand for them, Macau has built an international airport, a new container port, new bridges and causeways connecting the parts of the territory, housing developments on reclaimed land, cultural institutions such as museums and pavilions, theme parks, and colossal monuments, all designed to assert Macau’s regional and international importance.

The impetus for China’s reunification thus appeared as a coherent policy fairly recently, and was associated with the emergence of the concept of “Greater China” (10). Yet, while the term Greater China has come to embrace such diverse themes as a trans-national Chinese economic community spanning political boundaries and a global Chinese culture including Chinese populations around the world, both of which are related to more recent historical trends, the oldest and most enduring theme has been political reunification of the Chinese state after a period of division. In this respect, promotion of the other two themes has been viewed by the PRC as a means towards accomplishment of the third, political reunification (11).

Timing the handover

Various scenarios may be offered to explain China’s determination to assert its sovereignty over Macau at the end of the twentieth century. According to one explanation, Macau was a poor, backward and nearly forgotten place until it began a slow recovery in the 1960s under the influence of the development of gambling, tourism and light export industries. Formerly irrelevant to China’s aspirations for modernisation, Macau was at first perceived as more valuable to China as a point of access to the West and to foreign exchange earnings, until the early 1980s when China began to open to the West (12). Only then did it become an economic resource which, like Hong Kong, was worth repossessing completely. Thus, it was only in the last two decades that Macau’s return to China became “inevitable.”

A second explanation links the fate of Macau to Hong Kong. China viewed Hong Kong, with its much larger economic output, access to world trade and finance, and technological resources, as its ultimate objective. In the 1980s Hong Kong was the source of 40% of China’s foreign exchange and nearly 70% of its foreign investment (13). As long as Hong Kong provided a vital source of revenue, China was anxious to avoid any action, such as a hostile take-over of Macau, that might destabilise the colony. Once the return of Hong Kong was peacefully settled, the fate of Macau could be decided without further delay (14).

Taiwan is the key factor in a third explanation. The loss of Taiwan during the revolutionary civil war was the most significant failure (both materially and symbolically) of the modern Chinese revolution (Hong Kong and Macau were lost by imperial China—the Qing and the Ming, respectively). The “economic miracle” achieved by Taiwan from the 1960s made it the greatest prize and also the greatest threat to the PRC’s own claim to sovereignty and legitimacy. Anxious not to frighten Taiwan away from acceptance of eventual reunification and to project an image of moderation, China avoided acting precipitously to recover Hong Kong and Macau (15). Thus China pursued a policy of both firmness and steadiness towards its “lost territories” (suggesting inevitability of the eventual outcome) together with accommodation and concessions to traditional ways manifested in the “One Country, Two Systems” doctrine (demonstrating conciliation) as a reassuring model to hold up to Taiwan. But to delay retaking Macau would send a message to Taiwan that it could remain intransigent indefinitely; taking Macau under terms of the Basic Law on Macau negotiated with Portugal showed the benefits Taiwan could also expect to enjoy under the “One Country, Two Systems” model (16).

Finally, Chinese nationalist sentiment had always rankled at the loss of Macau, even as far back as the late Ming, but China was weak and helpless against Western imperialism until the open door and Four Modernisations policies of Deng Xiaoping brought industrial and military growth in the 1980s. Then China, perceived as a growing world power no longer driven by radical domestic political movements, and free of both external inhibitions and domestic political preoccupations, was able to assert its will without fear of serious opposition. The return of Macau to Chinese sovereignty, like Hong Kong, was a statement that China had now matured as a significant international power to be reckoned with and finally settled an abiding national grievance. This explanation will be considered at greater length below.

No doubt, the explanation for China’s determination to recover control of Macau lies in some measure in all of these various scenarios. China was influenced by diverse considerations, not by any single one, to insist on the return of Macau before the end of the century.

Macau and the Hong Kong model

One of the most remarkable aspects of Macau’s reversion is the conformity of the process to that followed by Hong Kong, including the sequence of negotiations, the almost identical language of written agreements, and the general structure and provisions of the respective Basic Laws. In the case of Macau, the Sino-Portuguese Joint Declaration agreeing to the timetable and the process leading to the handover was issued in 1987 after the decision to enter into negotiations was announced in 1985. A Basic Law Drafting Committee was formed in 1988 and a draft Macau Basic Law was completed in early 1993. It was passed by the National People’s Congress in March 1993. A Sino-Portuguese Joint Liaison Group was then formed and a Preparatory Committee of the Macau Special Administrative Region appointed in 1998 to work on implementation of the handover. The Macau Basic Law is virtually a carbon-copy of Hong Kong’s, including provisions borrowed from the Hong Kong law that either are not really appropriate to Macau or have no precedent there (17).

Although the process for Hong Kong began two years earlier, in 1983, the sequence was almost identical, and it has often been suggested that the negotiations for Hong Kong’s handover provided the template for Macau’s, as if Macau, a far less significant entity overshadowed by Hong Kong in so many ways, should naturally follow the example of its larger neighbour in this one as well (18).

This similarity is notable because the two cases are actually quite different from each other, both in their respective origins and in their social, political and cultural characteristics (19). First, Macau’s legal system is based on Portuguese law, which in turn is derived from Roman law (20). Hong Kong law, on the other hand, is based on English common law. The two legal systems present very different problems of adaptation and translation into Chinese language and practice. Furthermore, Hong Kong’s civil service was based on the resident Chinese population, while Macau’s was largely recruited from Portuguese civil servants, temporarily appointed from Lisbon with no local social base, and from the small Portuguese-speaking Macanese community. Localisation of Macau’s civil service and legal system has proved to be especially difficult to accomplish owing to the failure of the Portuguese administration to recruit and train a cadre of local Chinese civil servants.

Second, while the economies of the two territories both grew rapidly following World War II, they developed in distinctive ways. Hong Kong became a powerful international financial and commercial centre, based on the migration of entrepreneurial talent from Shanghai, far more robust than Macau, which relied on export-oriented industry, tourism and especially revenue from the gambling concession. Though Hong Kong is vastly larger than Macau, the difference between the two economies has always been as much qualitative as quantitative.

Third, over several centuries Macau developed a distinctive multi-cultural society comprising European Portuguese, indigenous Eurasian Macanese, and Chinese cultural components, with influences from Portugal’s other Asian and African possessions. No such creole society or distinctive culture ever emerged in Hong Kong. In Macau, however, the existence of an indigenous creole population and a unique culture has posed special problems for the process of reversion. For example, the question of the national identity of Macau residents holding Portuguese passports, and of the Macanese (Portuguese-speaking Eurasians) in general, has been a particularly delicate issue without parallel in the case of Hong Kong residents, very few of whom held first-class British passports with the right of abode in the United Kingdom (21).

Fourth, Macau claims a considerable historical heritage accumulated over more than four centuries, that is most visible in its architecture (22). Although Macau’s architectural patrimony has been inadequately acknowledged and protected as a potential economic resource, issues of historical and cultural preservation arguably create special problems for Macau. Hong Kong, with a much shorter history, largely chose to sacrifice what little architectural and cultural patrimony it possessed to the free market exigencies of economic development (23). While the loss of colonial attributes and the disappearance of British influence will not affect Hong Kong’s autonomy as a Special Administrative Region, Macau’s future will depend very much on whether it can preserve a distinctive cultural identity in the face of overwhelming mainland influence (24).

Fifth, Macau’s political structure, while it by no means can be characterised as a participatory democracy, was based on a combination of directly appointed officials and municipal legislative councils from its early days. This system enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy from direct control by Lisbon. Beginning in 1976, following the Portuguese revolution of 1974, popular elections were introduced that produced a successively more open participatory legislative system (25). Hong Kong was ruled in a much more authoritarian manner as a British Crown Colony with a governor appointed by the Crown and advisory councils without significant independent powers. Not until after the agreement on Hong Kong’s return to China was reached in 1983 were democratic reforms introduced in the very beginning of the 1990s by the last governor, Chris Patten, in spite of strong displeasure expressed by Peking, which felt, with some justification, that this new-found interest in democracy violated a tacit understanding that Hong Kong would be administered by the British in an authoritarian manner that would preclude eventual autonomous decolonisation.

All of these points suggest that a very different sort of process from the one applied to Hong Kong should govern the restoration of Macau to Chinese control. Perhaps one practical acknowledgement of the difference between the two cases is the Chinese agreement to a legislative “through train” for Macau, the acceptance of the continuation of the elected legislature through the 1999 handover. Such a possibility was denied to Hong Kong when Governor Patten introduced his legislative democratisation programme.

What differentiated Macau from Hong Kong more than anything else is the matter of colonial status. Hong Kong was indisputably a colony of Great Britain from 1842 to 1997, and decolonisation was a legitimate issue in deciding Hong Kong’s future. If Macau was ever a colony of Portugal, it was from 1844, when Portugal unilaterally declared Macau to be an overseas province, to 1976, when the new revolutionary government in Lisbon established the Organic Statute of Macau beginning the devolution of power to local institutions (26). In 1845 Portugal declared Macau a free port and in 1846 the new governor, Ferreira do Amaral, determined to make Macau a full colony, ended payments of fees and taxes to China, evicted Chinese customs officials, and in 1849 expelled the last Chinese officials from the city (27). However, China had previously—in 1843—in spite of its severely weakened position after its defeat in the Opium War, rebuffed Portuguese demands to make Macau a colony; Governor Amaral was assassinated in 1849 in retaliation for his unilateral actions; and the 1887 Treaty of Amity and Commerce, though negotiated as an “equal” treaty and intended to formalise these changes in status, actually left the question of sovereignty ambiguous (28). Thus China never formally consented to the conversion of Macau to colonial status.

If the territory remained in practice a de facto colony through World War II, Chinese sovereignty never legally lapsed (29). Even before Lisbon’s formal action in 1975 to “decolonise” Macau, Portugal had lost effective power there since the 1966 Cultural Revolution “December Third Incident” (yiersan shijian), when a minor dispute over the closing of a school in Taipa led to violent demonstrations against Portuguese authority inspired by Red Guards (30). In early 1967 the Portuguese capitulated to local Chinese control. Henceforth no important decisions could be made without Chinese agreement, and Ho Yin, head of the Macau Chinese Chamber of Commerce, became Peking’s unofficial representative in Macau. The Portuguese administration was never under any illusions about who really governed Macau (31). The Portuguese military garrison was finally withdrawn in 1975. When formal diplomatic relations between China and Portugal were established in 1979, Macau’s status was declared to be “Chinese territory under temporary Portuguese administration”. This status was of indeterminate duration, and although subject to the pleasure of the Chinese, might have lasted indefinitely.

Based on Macau’s experience, an argument can be made for the existence of a “Macau model” as a prior alternative to the Hong Kong model for the resumption of sovereignty over the two territories (32). China might well have been content to let Hong Kong’s status remain undecided, following the Macau model, since it was anxious to avoid upsetting the stability of Hong Kong and with it the significant earnings it derived from the colony. After all, China did not recognise the legality of the 1842 and 1860 treaties, and Britain hoped to continue to administer Hong Kong after 1997 in exchange for recognition of Chinese sovereignty, presumably in the same fashion that Portugal held Macau as a “Chinese territory under temporary Portuguese administration.” China implied acceptance of such an indeterminate status when it stated that “the whole Hong Kong area will be recovered when conditions are ripe” (33). But Britain, which nevertheless had initially insisted upon the legality of the treaties, which included the provision for the expiration of the lease on the New Territories, pressed the point with Peking as it nervously contemplated the approach of the 1997 deadline. Having been placed on the table for public discussion, the issue now became a factor in economic projections, such as amortisation of property investments. China was thus forced to act in order to pre-empt economic panic in Hong Kong in anticipation of an uncertain future, and once having done so for Hong Kong, Macau would have remained an unacceptable anomaly.

The issue of sovereignty

The issues surrounding Macau’s return to Chinese control become clearer when viewed objectively in light of the empirical historical relationship between Macau and China. China’s perspective on Macau changed over time, influenced by such factors as China’s strength relative to the Western powers and Macau’s practical usefulness to China in the context of its local or national interests.

1550-1600 The Portuguese were permitted by local authorities to occupy Macau in the mid-1550s as a solution to an ongoing problem of trade relations and instability along the South China coast. China under the Ming was then in a strong position, but the central government in Peking had little knowledge or interest in the arrangements brokered by local merchant interests (34).

1600-1700 Macau and its inhabitants began to appear troublesome to Chinese authorities in the early seventeenth century, and its value was seen as increasingly dubious. But China in the late Ming, afflicted by Manchu invasions, Japanese piracy, and peasant rebellions, was now in a period of dynastic decline, and a modus vivendi between the Portuguese and the Chinese was reached that allowed Macau to continue under limited autonomy (35). While conditions in South China remained fragmented and uncertain through the period of the Qing conquest, until the region was fully assimilated into the Qing state in the 1680s, Macau was left largely to its own devices to flourish as a commercial entrepot.

1700-1800 Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Macau served local official and commercial interests in the exploitation of South China trade, which was growing in Canton under British dominance and was finally restricted to that port in the mid-eighteenth century. While the Qing, which was then at the height of its authority and power, could easily have taken over Macau, the territory continued to serve central government purposes in localising the control of foreigners to the Canton region. Macau was a useful adjunct to the complicated and highly regulated Canton trading system. Moreover, the Qing, with a far-flung tributary system encompassing relations with outlying states, was not particularly obsessed with legalistic issues of sovereignty.

1800-1900 By the mid-nineteenth century Macau had become marginalised first by the growth of trade in Canton and then by the acquisition of Hong Kong by the British and the creation of the treaty ports after 1860. Macau had now lost its former raison d’être—except for a brief importance as the centre of the coolie trade—and reached its nadir in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However China, under the late Qing, was once again in a moribund condition, and Macau held little relative significance compared to other territorial problems facing the Qing (36). It was at this time that Portugal, taking advantage of China’s prostrate condition, tried to achieve sovereign accession of Macau, but the Treaty of 1887 between Portugal and China failed to settle the issue of sovereignty.

1900-1950 With revolution and warlordism engulfing China in the first half of the twentieth century, Macau became largely irrelevant to political and economic developments in China, except as an occasional place of refuge for nationalist and revolutionary leaders, and later a neutral base for wartime intelligence gathering on the Japanese (37). While China was deeply divided and preoccupied by revolutionary civil war and foreign invasion, Macau hardly registered in Chinese official consciousness (38).

1950-1980 With relative peace and stability returning to the region after the communist victory in 1949, Macau became a useful point of contact and access to a still hostile and suspicious West. The territory served mainly economic interests of China as a source of foreign currency earnings. Now unified under the People’s Republic, China was slowly growing in power. China’s entry into the Korean War in 1950, however, assured its continued containment by hostile powers for many years afterward, pre-empting any further unification of lost territories, and, shaken by successive violent upheavals and setbacks in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, China’s freedom of action was severely limited.

1980-1999 By the fourth quarter of the century, Macau began to experience economic and demographic growth and greater prosperity. But it was further marginalised by the much greater economic expansion of Hong Kong, the creation of SEZs by China (China’s home-grown version of treaty ports), and the advancing economic integration of the Pearl River Delta region. The PRC was now emerging as an economic and political power in its own right, and felt much less constrained by hostile international pressures. Therefore, only at this time do we see the convergence of conditions of Chinese strength and freedom to act on the one hand, and the absence of any interest by China in preserving Macau’s separate autonomy or sovereignty on the other hand. Simply stated, in each of the previous phases of the China-Macau relationship, China either was too weak to act to take back control of Macau when it might have otherwise been in its interests to do so, or, although enjoying a position of relative strength, found it advantageous to leave Macau’s status unchanged.

What was different about the last phase of China’s posture with respect to Macau from all previous phases was China’s recent historical experience (in the century prior to 1949) of humiliation by Western imperialism and aggression. China finally “stood up” as a modern state in 1949 in a way that had a very different meaning in the twentieth century than it had in the seventeenth, the eighteenth, or even the nineteenth centuries. The realisation of sovereignty and its full acknowledgement by foreign powers became the pre-eminent goal, at least in the international arena if not also in the domestic arena (39). To be meaningful, sovereignty could not be compromised, or the vestiges of humiliation and defeat would remain forever to haunt China’s self-image. If the humiliations suffered by the Qing were also modern Chinese humiliations, then by the same token the sovereign territories of the Qing (ambiguous as these may actually have been) were the sovereign rights inherited by the PRC (40). To be complete, sovereignty must be resumed over all of China’s lost territories—thus the importance of the brief war with India in 1962 in spite of the insignificance of the disputed territory involved (41). Likewise Taiwan, though ruled by a Chinese government, owed its autonomy largely to the protective military umbrella extended over it by the United States since the 1950s, and was hence artificially kept out of the motherland’s embrace.

The symbolism associated with the resumption of sovereignty over Macau did not diminish with the development of the open door policies under Deng. The vestiges of Western imperialism that the Chinese view as United States hegemonism in the post-Cold War era—continued protection of Taiwan, resistance to Most Favoured Nation treatment and World Trade Organisation membership, the United States’ proposal for a Theatre Nuclear Defence arrangement with Japan, harassment over human rights and nuclear proliferation—make it all the more essential that China reaffirms its complete sovereignty over all its traditional territories. The importance of the symbolism of sovereignty, including increasingly its domestic consumption, must not be underestimated. Sovereignty remains a constant theme in Chinese nationalist rhetoric (42). The dominating rhetoric of sovereignty in the Chinese response to the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May 1999 attests to this fact. Thus, whatever else Macau may represent to China—new economic resources of tourism and development, access to Western and global markets, modern technology, and so on—the exercise of sovereignty is the overwhelming motive of China in resuming possession of Macau as soon as practicable. In this respect, the unique internal economic, social, and cultural character of Macau and its historical development are largely irrelevant to the purely external considerations of Chinese sovereign unification.

Population of Macau, 1980-1999

Sources: “Asia Region Population Projections; Population and Vital Statistics”, Statistical Papers Series A, Vol. 43, No. 1, New York, United Nations, 1991, p. 10; SCMP, August 12th 1991, September 16th 1993, June 7th 1994, July 20th 1995, January 3rd 1997, April 26th 1997; Government Information Services, Macau 99 Report, 3rd edition, 1999, p. 9.