MSAR lacks focus on Lusophone link

The presence of China’s prime minister Wen Jiabao at last year’s Forum Macau ministerial conference ‘firmly placed Macau on the global map,’ said researcher Carmen Amado Mendes (File: November 2010)

The Forum for Economic and Trade Cooperation between China and Portuguese-speaking countries, know as Forum Macau, is “a completely new idea” but the territory can do more to make the most of the Lusophone link, a visiting scholar said yesterday.
“I believe there should be somebody within the MSAR Government in charge of overseeing the promotion of these links,” Carmen Amado Mendes stressed.
The professor at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, believes a “more global supervision” and “better coordination” would solve the “lack of a strategy”. Forum Macau was created in 2003 so “perhaps authorities have yet to sit down and think about how to maximise it,” she said.
At the same time the local population “must not rest on this criticism,” the scholar said. “Society can do much more,” she added. Macau “has every interest in the Forum success even though sometimes it doesn’t seem so”.
For instance, Ms Amado Mendes said, last year’s Forum Macau ministerial conference that brought Chinese premier Wen Jiabao to the territory “firmly placed Macau on the global map”.
But so far the organisation has “not been so helpful for local companies,” she acknowledged during the seminar ‘Macau and the Forum Macau: an innovative model of trans-regional integration?’

Brilliant idea

During the ministerial conference Wen Jiabao announced the creation of a USD 1 billion (MOP 7.98 billion) three-year fund to support “financial cooperation” between the private sectors of both sides.
Some Portuguese-speaking countries have bemoaned the delay in implementing the fund but Ms Amado Mendes believes the announcement was China’s way to “nurture a more pro-active” attitude among its Forum Macau partners.
“There is a clear will to launch this investment but we are talking about a country that does nothing in a hurry,” she emphasised. “China is surveying the countries to see the best way to utilise this fund.”
Forum Macau “is a brilliant idea from a Chinese point of view but also for Macau and the Lusophone countries,” the researcher said, but also a very unusual one. “It’s using the legacy of the colonial power, namely a common language and culture, to create a link to these countries.”
At the same time, although Macau has no autonomy on foreign policy, Beijing has proven to be “very flexible” in allowing the territory “to have a representative on what is in fact an international organisation,” she added.
Yet the Forum Macau has no legal status, unlike its Permanent Secretariat, Ms Amado Mendes underlined. On the one hand, “that would be to acknowledge that Macau can be in an international organisation”.
On the other, it’s a way for China to try to attract São Tomé e Príncipe, a country that is currently just a Forum Macau observer because it has diplomatic relations with Taiwan, she said.
The organisation has been one more “soft power instrument” in helping create “a positive perception” of China’s way of life and development model in the African continent, the scholar said.                     

V.Q.