Spectator's Journal/Holy Macau

...Centuries ago Western traders made this Portuguese enclave the richest entrepOt in the world, and as the Asian base of Christianity its bishop once boasted jurisdiction over "the whole province of China, as also the islands of Japan and Macau, together with the other islands adjacent...

...Had Kipling ever visited this tiny Portuguese territory—two small islands and a jagged peninsula at the mouth of the Pearl River—he would have had to revise his judgment about the twain of East and West...

...Unlike the British, who didn't get out this way until the middle of the last century, the Portuguese had pretty much stolen Macau fair and clear by 1563, even formally annexing it in 1887...

...On a wooden bench along the Praia Grande, an elderly Chinese picks his feet...

...Unfortunately the cobbled floors and romantic aura of the place attract a particularly noxious modern-day pest, the professional British expatriate, such as the creature who made his appearance on the verandah one evening...

...It is also the place Lisbon has just agreed to cede to China on December 20, 1999...

...Very much in the cups, he grilled the helpless staff about Macau's governor, the patronizing tone embarrassing even his Chinese mistress but making the rest of us look wonderful by comparison...

...For anyone who wants both comfort and character, there is even a tastefully refurbished seventeenth-century Portuguese fort, where guests can relax in medieval splendor (and modern air conditioning) for less than the cost of a night at your average Howard Johnson's...

...For along with the bottles of vinho verde, the locals have also imported the Portuguese word amanha...

...For the past two decades, the territory has been dominated by a pro-Peking faction of businessmen, legislators, trade unions, and teachers who have not exactly encouraged debate...

...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL HOLY MACAU Macau H igh above the tired banyan trees, ramshackle huts, and decaying colonial mansions that ring the coastline of this little patch of land off mainland China, night shrugs and makes way for daybreak...

...Unlike the British, who introduced a special second-class citizenship passport that would allow Hong Kong residents to travel to but not settle in Britain, Portuguese law will recognize nationality claims of almost 100,000 Macau residents, which gives them the right of abode in Portugal if they so choose...

...Probably, too, Peking figured (correctly) that it could regain Macau at its leisure, something made easier by the unilateral Portuguese decision to renounce sovereignty and designate Macau "a Chinese territory under Portuguese administration" after the giveaway was rebuffed...

...But it will be left to future historians to suggest that Macau's own sorry fate might have been very different had Margaret Thatcher's back been a little stiffer...

...Recently, in fact, some Portuguese officials have been arrested for selling illegal passports, with the going rate said to be in the neighborhood of $5,000...

...Not that Lisbon was inclined to fight...

...Today the ruins of the Jesuit basilica Sao Paulo's—whose grand stone facade, carved largely by exiled Japanese Christians in the seventeenth century, is all that remains—is the perfect metaphor for Macau's faded glory...

...But Macau had no such expired lease...

...strictly speaking it means "tomorrow" but a better translation is "not today," an Iberian temper that nicely complements the natural languor of the Asian tropics...

...W ith no airport and a population of only 426,000, Macau but for a twist of geopolitical fate might have remained the picturesque retreat from the chrome-and-bustle of Anglo-Saxon Hong Kong it had become: a place whose Old World charms make the many inconveniences of the Older World somewhat tolerable...

...The many Chinese refugees who fled here after the 1949 upheavals on the mainland are now finding the European powers as devoid of substance as this facade, having all the wrong virtues and none of the right vices proper to leadership today...

...When in 1842 the British set up their own shop in nearby Hong Kong, which lured away the serious China traders with its better ports and facilities, the administration here competed in admirable Latin fashion by legalizing gambling and horse racing, an industry that now accounts for about a fifth of the isWilliam McGurn is deputy editorial page editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal...

...As for Hong Kong, although there are plenty of good reasons for maintaining the status quo (not least the desire of the colony's people), the deal that hands it back to China was at least based on an earlier agreement signed by William McGurn by Her Majesty's representatives when they first arrived in Asia...

...Back in 1974, moreover, a new left-wing government in Lisbon, flush from its near-bloodless overthrow of the old dictatorship, even tried to give Macau back...

...But China worried that a premature acquisition might jeopardize its THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 35 designs on the prize jewel of Hong Kong...

...Probably because it could maintain effective control over Macau by controlling the land border gate with the mainland through which the territory's food came, China's Ming Dynasty attached no time conditions on the Portuguese...

...This has Britain worried, because under European Community law these Chinese could move anywhere in Europe now that Portugal is an EC member...

...In the rush to de-Westernize Asia through the purging of its colonial powers, the world is overlooking thecrucial point that whatever measure of individual rights and freedoms Asia aspires to owes itself to Western ideals...

...And in this proximity lies a sorry tale, because Macau is the first of the two remaining capitalist dominoes (the other is Taiwan) to fall from the SinoBritish accord that will see Peking get its hands back on Hong Kong come 1997...

...sandaled merchants pull back the tarps covering their counterfeit Gucci bags and Lacoste shirts...

...Meanwhile, in the cobbled streets and gaming parlors of Macau, residents await a future that most had resigned themselves to when Britain yielded on Hong Kong...

...Of all the improbabilities, only Taiwan, with its strong military and newfound prosperity, is safe from having its future signed away by white men in far-off Western capitals...

...Like that British gentleman, most of Macau's 4.6 million annual visitors pop over from Hong Kong, which at only fifty-five minutes by jetfoil is a far cry from the proverbial slow boat to China...

...It was Pascal who once suggested that history might have been very different had Cleopatra's nose bcen shorter...

...land's gross domestic product...

...In other words, the only reason China "deserves" Macau back is by virtue of China's claim to sovereignty over all lands once Chinese—a claim not entirely unlike that advanced by a certain European nation just four decades ago...

...That, plus the precedent of Hong Kong and the veiled threat of a Sino Anschluss (all the more possible with Britain out of the picture), sealed Macau's fate...

...the walls sweat with humidity...

...Although Macau has more than its share of hideous glass boxes, it has managed to retain a seedy dignity through the ochreand-cream-colored colonial buildings it keeps in the same state of splendid disrepair as those in Mother Lisbon...

...Nevertheless, amid their hasty retreat from Asia the Portuguese did manage one concession in the way of honor the British specifically excluded: passports...

...Cats yawn and stretch...

...So it goes today, six square miles of open-air markets, ancient Buddhist temples, 24-hour blackjack, quaint Portuguese chapels, jai alai, and an imitation Folies Bergere called the Crazy Paris Show...

...Having closed that avenue to all except a handful of well-connected Hong Kong citizens, London fears that a lax or corrupt administration -in Macau, not impossible to imagine here, could make the acquisition of a Portuguese passport by Hong Kong Chinese relatively easy...

...Indeed, not two days after the draft agreement on Macau's future was initialed this past spring, China's vice premier, Yao Yilin, said that although Peking hoped Taiwan would now come along quietly, the mainland "had not excluded non-peaceful means" to reclaim its wayward child...

...This is the land the sailors claimed for Portugal four centuries ago as "the City of the Name of God There Is None More Loyal," Macau...