‘It’s now or never’: ‘City of Dreams’ is battling for survival

Macau: Drive into downtown Macau and the first thing you will see is the golden hourglass tower of the Lisboa Casino puncturing the horizon. Between the Venetian and MGM Grand hotels, there are life-size replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben.

Three decades of casino money have made this city rich, fast, but dive beneath the shimmering surface and you will find a centuries-old culture battling to survive.

The Grand Lisboa casino towers over apartment blocks in downtown Macau. Credit: Daniel Ceng

The challenge is part identity, part political. The “good boy” to Hong Kong’s “bad boy”, Beijing’s golden goose kept locals happy with annual cash handouts from casino revenue. China got little political turmoil in return.

Now some residents fear Macau has been plucked so much that it is in danger of losing the characteristics that made it different from the mainland.

“It is now or never,” says Antonio Monteiro, the president of the Macanese Youth Association. “We have to adapt. If we don’t, we are under threat.”

To get to this point you need to go back almost 500 years. The Portuguese set up trading posts in Macau and eventually leased the territory from China. Over time, the fusion of Portuguese-Chinese families became the Macanese.

Fresh out of the oven: Portuguese tarts in Macau.Credit: Daniel Ceng

“We are a sandwich between the two cultures,” says Monteiro.

Portuguese tarts in Macau became the egg tarts now served around the world at yum cha or dim sum. Portuguese fried rice comes with Chinese sausage. The Macanese melting pot also took on influences from other Portuguese outposts including Malacca in Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Goa in India.

“It was the first fusion food,” says chef and restaurant owner Ana Maria Manhao Sou, who speaks four languages: Cantonese, Mandarin, English and Portuguese.

Portuguese is everywhere in Macau – on banks, libraries, taxis, and buses – but only 3 per cent of the population speaks it. Even fewer speak its Macanese creole, Patua, which is a blend of Cantonese, Portuguese, Malay and Sinhalese that developed over centuries.

“It is almost extinct, but I think it is our history,” Sou says. “We must keep it.”

Casinos in Taipa, Macau.Credit: Daniel Ceng

UNESCO lists Patua as “critically endangered”. In the year 2000, less than 50 people spoke it. Monteiro says there are no more than a dozen native speakers today, most of them above the age of 80.

Miguel De Senna Fernandes, a lawyer and Patua playwright, struggles to think of more than a handful.

The language, like the food, is full of Cantonese, Malay, and Sinhalese appropriations. Cantonese idioms have been translated into Portuguese. In Patua, you don’t say someone is talking too much, you say someone is breathing too loudly.

Macanese lawyer and playwright Miguel De Senna Fernandes. Credit: Daniel Ceng

Some of it, like the word “azinha” (meaning “quickly”), has not been spoken in Portugal since the 16th century. “It is frozen in time,” Fernandes says.

“Why bother trying to save it?

“It is like the photos you have of your granddad. You don’t keep them because they are useful. You keep them because it says something about you, your past and your belonging.”

There is also a sharper, satirical edge to a language that was mostly spoken by workers at home, not the elites in government.

“Traditionally people used it to criticise the government,” Fernandes says. “Even in China, you have codes.”

Fernandes makes it clear he is not being political. Everyone talks about Beijing’s red lines here like they are picket fences. They know where they are. They don’t cross them. The self-censorship keeps everyone in the game in the “City of Dreams”.

“Of course, we know the boundaries,” Fernandes says. “We know where we have to stop.”

Centuries of differing political styles are now playing out in stark contrast just 60 kilometres apart in Hong Kong and Macau. When the British occupied Hong Kong, they barged in with rifles, humiliated China in the Opium Wars and installed British customs at many levels of society, including law and education.

In Hong Kong, this helped create a passionate and occasionally activist local population that took to the streets in their millions when some of those British norms were threatened by Beijing in 2019.

In Macau, the Portuguese rented the territory from the Chinese for more than four centuries and then handed it back to Beijing in 1999, two years after the British returned Hong Kong. Portugal’s slower style of political negotiations meant the parties often took their time and came to an agreement. Eventually, this approach melded more smoothly with the Chinese consensus model compared to the more hostile negotiations undertaken by the British.

Monteiro says Macau is more passive than its neighbour. “We do things step by step,” he says. “We wait until we can get together to talk and achieve common sense.”

Still, the pace of some changes in Macau since Beijing’s national security crackdown on Hong Kong escalated in 2019 has unnerved some of its most patient observers.

“In the past four years there have been quite sudden changes,” says Professor Ieong Meng U, a government expert at the University of Macau.

Antonio Monteiro, the president of the Macanese Youth Association. Credit: Daniel Ceng

Memorials commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4 have been banned, pro-democracy legislative assembly members have been barred from taking office and a newspaper critical of the government has been shut down. Artists are increasingly self-censoring their work. The government of Macau did not respond to requests for comment.

Au Kam San, a former member of the Macau Legislative Assembly, used to lead the Macau Joint Association for Democratic Development. For three decades he hosted an annual 500-person memorial for the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In 2021, at the height of Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, his association was disqualified from running for office in Macau because the government branded it disloyal.

“Macau is doomed,” he says.

Au, a father of three, faces the possibility of jail for openly criticising Beijing.

Pro-democracy activist and former lawmaker Au Kam-sun. Credit: Daniel Ceng

“It is only a matter of time. There is a Chinese saying: if a man wants to beat his dog, he can easily find a stick,” he says.

“The only change that will happen for Macau is when China itself changes. I’m just trying to squeeze a little bit of space in a huge cage.”

Ieong’s office at the University of Macau is right on the edge of the information cage.

The campus is actually in Guangdong province on the mainland, just across the river separating Macau from Dahengqin Island. There are no customs to go through, but step outside the campus grounds and you are in China. Inside the campus, there is no great firewall, but go outside and Facebook, Google, WhatsApp and Instagram become suddenly inaccessible.

Professor Ieong Meng U, a government expert at the University of Macau, which is on the border with China. Credit: Daniel Ceng

“The influence from China has always been very strong in Macau,” Ieong says. “It has just become more obvious [in the past few years].”

Beijing’s plans for the Greater Bay Area, which will integrate the mainland megacities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen and the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau in a series of 30-minute loops, mean that some residents fear Macau will lose its waning identity.

Incremental changes to school curriculums and public notices have made Mandarin increasingly dominant. In some areas, the default language in restaurants is already Mandarin despite resistance from Cantonese speakers who refuse to order in the mainland language.

A woman takes a selfie at the Sculpture Park of the Chinese Ethnics in Macau. Credit: Daniel Ceng

At the statue park of Chinese ethnicities in downtown Macau there are dozens of statues of China’s official ethnic groups, including Tibetans, Uyghurs and Uzbeks. But there are no Macanese. It is a symptom of the ongoing tension between Macau’s identity and its future with the mainland.

Monteiro says the Macanese will have to adapt or die.

“We need to reinvent ourselves to let our culture be part of the economic strategy,” he says. “Some people need to wake up. We have to recognise that we are part of China.”

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