Macau Business | October 2023
Keith Morrison – Author and educationist
Once upon a time there was a cockerel who succumbed to flattery when a wily fox told him that he had the most magnificent singing voice, especially when he sang with his eyes closed tightly. The cockerel closed its eyes, flapped its wings, and sang like a superstar, whereupon the fox grabbed him and ran off with him. Pride blinds people to the real situation. This Chaucerian tale is an allegory of Macau; Macau flatters itself, is perennially blind to its limitations, delights in closing its eyes to reality, and repeatedly has more talk than substance.
Take, for example, Macau pinning its economic hopes and aspirations on its ‘one plus four’ strategy for economic diversification. It has spread its wings of fancy beyond international tourism, to imagining that its prospective (1) health services, (2) financial services, (3) technology, and (4) large-scale events can become centres of international quality and attraction in Macau, and all within a five-year initial time scale. What stunning hubris this is, and what blindness accompanies it (look at Macau’s light rail system: doomed to succeed; to date an expensive flop). Close your eyes, flap your wings, sing with pride, flatter yourself, and be blind to reality; that’s Macau, a funny little place with delusions of being able to punch above its weight.
For each of the ‘plus four’ development areas, imagine the following responses.
If you want the best, highest quality health services, where do you go? Singapore, London, Boston, Hawaii, Bangkok? Answer: no; I love Macau. Very odd.
If you want the best financial services, where do you go? London, New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore? No; I love grubby little Macau, with its reputation for creative money laundering.
If you want the best technology, where do you go? Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Tokyo, London, New York? No; it’s Macau for me!
If you want the best, large-scale, cultural, sporting, and conference events, where do you go? London, Paris, New York, Singapore, Barcelona, Dubai? No, no; get it right: everyone knows that it’s Macau. Not.
Macau’s ambitions simply do not ring true. Macau does not have the necessary expertise, experience, skills, foundations, platforms, quality, and reputation to be able to convince punters to put their money into the ‘plus four’ development areas. Such diversification is an image of air, a wonderland dream, a fiction, even a joke.
Look at how the necessary international experts with international skill sets struggle to cope with Macau’s opaque immigration and labour practices. Where are Macau’s own high-quality local, experienced, knowledgeable, skilled experts? Where are the necessary international-level economics and business training institutions and students in Macau? How far is Macau’s legal framework prepared, suitable, and sufficiently extensive, for handling innovation? Where are the necessary trust, security, reliability and transparency in Macau? Where are the necessary institutional, tangible and intangible structural and infrastructural networks for the ‘plus four’ developments? Where is Macau’s readiness for embarking on this journey and taking risks? Where are the safety nets, financial security, foundations, and reforms needed to enable such developments to be more than castles built on sand? What cost/benefit and risk analysis, evaluation, safeguarding, and protections have been identified and addressed? Where is the evidence of all these made available for everyone to see?
What could possibly attract investors, developers, or punters to put their money into a territory that is hidebound by restrictive practices, Kafkaesque regulations and procedures, somewhat feudal governance, a monumental lack of transparency that reaches deeps into its heart, uncertain freedoms, labyrinthine bureaucracy, insufficient protections, and with neighbours and family members looking over Macau’s shoulders to control it? Where are the money, transparency, attractions, knowledge, ability, and facilitation coming from, for Macau to be the next Dubai, Singapore, London, or New York? Dream on.
Icarus thought that he could fly into the sun and get away with it. His fall from the sky is an allegory of pride, delusion, and the naivety of immature youth, and of the dangers of believing that you can do things that you cannot do and that don’t work. Look at economically young and immature Macau: ten out of ten for dreams, pride, arrogance, immodesty, and high-sounding, empty, fallacious, deceptively enticing words. Ten out of ten for optimism, hope, the absence of convincing evidence, and blindness to real, red-in-tooth-and-claw competition from established, experienced and worldy-wise international providers. Nought out of ten for realism.
In the wake of hubris comes nemesis; witness Icarus. Cock-a-doodle-doo.
