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MANKIND has been troubled by the clash of civilizations among different tribes, religions and nations, from ancient history until recent times, from local conflicts to world wars, bringing destruction to human and natural resources that knows no end. The question seems to remain the same: Is there any way of reducing clashes and increasing harmony among conflicting civilizations? How could our common dream of eternal peace come true?
Macau might give you the answer. Macau, almost invisible on the world map, might provide a feasible solution. Why Macau? I have to start from history.
1. Macau’s unique bridging role in history
In Chinese history, Macau, a tiny fishing enclave of not more than 2.5km2 (2) on the West coast of the Pearl River, only became known to the world after the Portuguese settled it in the mid-sixteenth century, when the Middle Kingdom still closed its doors from developing external relations. The Portuguese navigators, taking the opposite direction of the Chinese great navigator Zheng He of his expedition to the West one century earlier, took advantage of its settlement in Macau during its discoveries and expansion to the East, to turn it into an important trading hub of the Maritime Silk Route in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Macau was then linked with Korea and Japan in the North, with Mexico and the American continent through Manila in the East, with Siam, Cambodia, Malacca, Macassar, Flores, Solor and Timor in the South, and through Goa with Africa and Europe, and through Europe to the east coast of mid and South America, including Brazil. It was through all these links that a global maritime trade began to take shape, the first step of globalization. The Chinese navigators and traders of that period witnessed how Portuguese, and later also Spanish, became the lingua franca (common language) to conduct foreign trade. Chinese silk, tea, porcelain, arts and crafts became highly demanded and profitable merchandise in the world trade, while lots of agricultural products including maize from Latin America were introduced to China. Nao de China and Galeón de Manila were the main carriers of trade between Fujian/Macau, Manila, and Acapulco to Peru for more than two centuries. Silver brought in from Japan and the Americas, especially Mexico through Manila, was the main hardware to pay for China’s exported goods. That’s why the Mexican pataca, symbolizing the silver trade, became Macau’s currency until today.
It was a key regional role that Macau was playing during the first 3 centuries as China’s main gate to the outside world. Macau was opened to European traders as the only place for foreign residence before going to or coming from Canton (Guangzhou). Foreign ships had to be examined by Chinese customs officers in Macau before they were allowed to sail into Canton. That’s why by the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, long before the establishment of Hong Kong, Macau had a significant European community, with their consulates well established in this small territory, as described by the British writer Austin Coates: “Macau became the outpost of all Europe in China”,(3) under the joint control of the Portuguese and Chinese, as a special free zone on Chinese territory. It was in this free zone, where things between East and West were handled basically with mutual respect and mutual benefit, so that the increasing trade could bring a widespread and intensive cultural exchange between the two civilizations.
After Quanzhou, the Chinese port in Fujian Province, was closed by the Ming Emperor, the Arabs, Persians and Jews, the most active traders in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, used Macau and its neighbour Xiangzhou as their trading post, leaving traces of their religion, mosques and altars in this region. When the Portuguese settled in Macau, a church presence was established, Macau became the centre of the first Diocese of the Catholic Church in East Asia in 1575, strongly linked to churches in the whole region, inspite of the rivalries between the Portuguese and the Spanish for regional dominance. In 1594, the St. Paul College, the first college of a western style in the Far East, was established in Macau, to train the Jesuits in the Chinese and Japanese languages, culture and customs, before starting their missionary work in those countries. The Jesuits coming from different nations in Europe, especially from Latin Europe, like Matteo Ricci, Nicolaus Trigault, Thomas Pereira and others, became the first generation of outstanding Sinologists. The Jesuits together with their Chinese counterparts, like Xu Guangqi, Li Zichao, Wu Li and others, trained in Latin languages, brought about a two-way exchange of culture, by translating and introducing Western mathematics, astronomy, physics, architecture, medicine, weaponry, art of printing, music and fine arts, among other things, to the East, and introducing Chinese philosophy, literature, medicine, tea, porcelain, art and craft, architecture and painting to the West. The significant cultural interchange was one of Macau’s greatest contributions to world history. It was made possible because of mutual respect and mutual tolerance. It was expressed in the attitude of learning from each other by Liebknecht and Voltaire during the Enlightenment Movement in the West, and the Qing Emperor Kang Xi towards the Jesuits in the East. When the Holy See in Rome turned to a tougher line against the Chinese rites and customs, and came into violent conflicts with the conservatives in the Qing court, the Jesuits in Macau persisted in the moderate line, preserving the social harmony until today. The remaining ruins and façade of St. Paul’s Cathedral with its occidental and oriental design elements, is a symbol of Macau’s cultural identity, implying East-West coexistence, interaction and blending in folkloric customs, architecture, literature, painting, music and gastronomy.
The Japan-China trade via Macau to Nagasaki handled by the Portuguese blackships was flourishing, with a strong impact on Japanese culture, scaring the Shoguns, who later banned the trade and persecuted the Japanese Christians. They used Macau as their perfect shelter. But trade and cultural exchange continued to flourish in other parts of the region until the Portuguese and Spanish were overtaken by the Dutch, French, British and Americans. The rivalry between these maritime empires from the West to dominate the East was vividly expressed in the history of South-East and South Asia, including the kingdom of Ayutthaya (Siam) and its vassal states, as well as Cochinchina (Indo-China) and Indonesia throughout the sixteenth till the eighteenth century. The cross-cultural interaction in those parts of the region, however, never ceased to exist. A lot of Portuguese words were absorbed into the Indonesian language. Philippinos still retain their Spanish names and the Ceylonese (Sri Lankans) their Portuguese names. The Japanese still celebrate some of the Portuguese festivities, as part of their cultural heritage. Pockets of old Portuguese communities with their religion, customs and festivitites can still be seen in Myanmar, Malacca and Goa. Their commercial, religious and cultural links with Macau can still be traced in our historical archives. The colonization of the East by the West in the Asia Pacific went almost parallel with the colonization of the Americas. The study of Macau history can give evidence and comparison of this parallel process.
When the gate of one of the strongest bastions of the East—the Middle Kingdom—was kicked open by force by Western powers after the Opium Wars in 1840, Macau saw the equilibrium between East and West completely destroyed, resulting in the ever increasing humiliation of China until the end of World War II and the conclusion of the civil war in 1949. Macau suffered from colonalization, but not so bad as in Hong Kong, in the sense that the Chinese sovereignty over Macau was never ceded to the Portuguese. In 1978, when bilateral negotiations restarted over the status of Macau, the Portuguese admitted that Macau remained a “Chinese territory under Portuguese administration”, until 20 December 1999, when it reverted to the Chinese Government as a result of the Sino-Luso Joint Declaration in 1986. It was this special status that kept Macau as the earliest and longest Western settlement on Chinese soil, benefiting the whole region.
For a long time in the twentieth century, Macau maintained its special status as a neutral free port during the two world wars, never occupied by the Japanese, and became a shelter of refugees from the whole region, even during the social turmoil after the war, when many overseas Chinese from the region, as well as East Timorese fled as refugees to this tiny enclave.(4) At the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, many Chinese influential thinkers, reformers and revolutionaries, such as Zheng Guanying, Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei, Sun Yat Sen, etc. had access to Western learning through Macau and Japan, making Macau a platform for their activities, bringing about great social and political changes in modern China.
For the Chinese, Macau has been a springboard to going overseas, and has become a city of migrants, including the poor peasants from nearby regions who were sold as “piglets”, slaves or coolies to virgin lands abroad, as far as the Americas—Peru, Cuba and the Caribbeans. Chinese tea planters were sent to Brazil through Macau in the early nineteenth century. The earliest Chinese migrants were the seafarers and fishermen from Fujian, and later also from Guangdong, who brought with them the culture of Ah Ma, the goddess of seafarers who protected them all the way to Nan Yang (South-East Asia), where they settled and brought back with them the Nan Yang Culture—the Overseas Chinese Culture, which has absorbed some native and western elements, making a significant contribution to the modernization and diversification in the economy and culture of the Pearl River Delta, which became the cradle of Chinese capitalism.
When the People’s Republic suffered from Western embargo during Mao’s era, Macau, next to Hong Kong, remained open for a limited flow of capital, goods and migrants, acting as the only “nostrils” for China to keep contacts with their neighbours in the region and the West. When Deng Xiaoping regained power in 1978, the barrier was lifted. Macau and Hong Kong became China’s most important gates to bring in investment, technology, information and management know-how from the region to the mainland, which embarked on the road of reform from a closed and centralized economy to a more open and free market economy.
Compared to Hong Kong, Macau has a longer history of exposure to the West, in which Chinese culture had to coexist, interact, clash and blend with culture from the West. This process of coexistence and interaction seems to have produced different results compared to Hong Kong and other cities in China. In this small territory, there was no way for the Europeans to assimilate the millenia-old Chinese civilization, and no way for the Chinese to reject Western culture with its superiority in science and technology. The two sides have lived in harmony for most of the time, learning from each other and avoiding many violent clashes and conflicts. The high degree of tolerance within the Chinese and Portugugese cultures, has contributed a lot to this equilibrium. Macau has become a multi-racial and multi-cultural society, a melting pot of East and West. The interaction and blending of them is based on mutual respect and tolerance, implying more harmony than conflict, more check-and-balances than confrontation, more reconciliation than alienation, and maintaining a stability in plurality. This can be called the Macau model, different from the Hong Kong model, which is Anglo-Saxon, with more conflicts and confrontations...
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1. This paper was presented at the World Conference on Science, Art and Communication at Oxford, UK, August 2008, and updated in May 2009.
2. Macau’s area started with just a tiny enclave for the Portuguese settlement of around 2.5 square kilometres in the mid-sixteenth century, while after the Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Portuguese expanded its territory to the islands of Taipa and Coloane, as well as further north to the present border with China, and after continuous reclamation in the twentieth century, the total area has grown to 27km2, with an increaed population of over half a million.
3. Geoffrey C. Gunn, Encountering Macau, p. 28.
4. After World War II, during the anti-Chinese turmoils in the former colonies of the Western powers in Asia and Africa, many overseas Chinese were forced to leave those countries, and around 100,000 were stranded in Macau, the majority from Burma, Indonesia, Cambodia, Madagascar and Moçambique. Many among the second generation emigrated to Europe, America, Canada and Australia.
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Gary NGAI Mei Cheong was born in Indonesia where he received his primary and secundary Dutch education in Jakarta before going to Beijing in 1950 where he graduated from the People’s University in 1956, majoring in Chinese modern history, philosophy, economics and international relations. He knows eight languages and received a diploma in international management from the “Institut Européen d’Administration” (INSEAD), France, in 1983. Doing translation and research in Beijing, he has been an interpreter for Chinese top leaders until 1978. After emigrating to Macau for a family reunion, he was engaged as assistant director of Radio Macau, participated in the creation of Macau TV, became senior advisor to the Macau Government on China affairs, Vice-President of the Macau Institute of Culture and advisor to the Cultural Centre. After retirement in July 1997, he became Chairman of the Executive Committee for the Macau Sino-Latin Foundation, a private foundation which he helped to establish in 1996, with the objective of preserving Macau’s cultural identity, especially its Latinity, in order to build Macau into a strong link between China and the countries of Latin America. Awarded a medal for cultural merits by the Macau Government in June 1999, he has been working hard in promoting a better understanding of Macau’s cultural identity in numerous seminars inside and outside Macau and China. He has published many articles on the subject in English, Chinese and Portuguese, and was nominated to be a member of the world Latin Council based in Brazil, as well as a member of the board of the Brazil-China Chamber of Commerce. He is also an advisor to the Macau Overseas Chinese Association and of the South-East Asian Study Centre of Jinan University in Guangzhou, China; Secretary General of the Association to promote Trade, Tourism and Culture between Macau and Taiwan; and Vice-President of the Yan Huang Traditional Chinese Culture Association of Guangdong Province. In 2002 he was granted the “Twenty-first Century Award for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement” by the International Biographical Centre of Cambridge, UK and the American Biographical Institute, North Carolina, USA, and received a Lifetime Award for Social Sciences from both Biographical Institutes in 2007-08. He was a visiting scholar to do research on comparative cultures at the universities of La Trobe, the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and Australia National University during his two-year stay in Australia. After his return to Macau in 2005, he became one of the founders of the Macau Association to Promote Exchange between the Asia Pacific and Latin America (MAPEAL) and was elected President of its Executive Board, President of the Organizing Committee for the Federación Internacional De Estudios Sobre América Latina Y El Caribe (FIEALC) Thirteenth Congress held in September 2007 in Macau and President of FIEALC for the period 2007-2009. |
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| Issue 6.4 |
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World Mutation or
Epochal Challenge?
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