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Right place, right time. I’d hurriedly been contacted by my news agency as the world was struggling to come to grips comprehending the utter devastation caused by the magnitude 7.9-earthquake. As chance would have it, I’d been attending a wedding in mainland China not far away. The message was simple. Get to Sichuan province as quickly as [...]
Within seconds, lives were changed forever - the demise of loved ones, the destruction of homes and communities, the disappearance of possessions and means of income, the loss of irreplaceable memories and one’s sense of control in life – the crumbled hope and sense of security. A natural disaster of such magnitude hitting so close to home is beyond comprehension for most people in Macau. Just how do our minds and hearts make sense of tragedies on this scale? [...]
In late April, when Macau Chief Executive Edmund Ho announced that the new land development policy would freeze the expansion of existing casinos, he stressed that it was the intention of the central government in Beijing. There were speculations that while the Chief Executive had to convey Beijing’s policy directive to the people of Macau, some observers believed that he tried to use the central government’s intention as a shield to dampen any desire and terminate any lobby from the business elites who wished to witness more casinos in the rapidly developing Macau. Another speculation from the mass media was that the Macau government’s policy toward the termination of the overseas immigrants’ housing investment plan alarmed the top leadership, who had to pre-empt further leakage of government [...]
I read somewhere that Portugal is a country that has been in steady decline for the last four centuries. Allow me to correct that view. Portugal is a country that has been in steady decline for the last eight centuries, essentially ever since its birth. Being in steady decline is part of our nature. If success were to happen to us, say, by accident, we would lose our identity. Every Portuguese struggles with this reality. The Portuguese intelligentsia is constantly analyzing the causes of our poverty and misfortune, oscillating between a paralyzing pessimism and a miraculous solution that will fix the country and the people within a generation’s time. It is not surprising that we have turned into a bipolar and self-delusional nation. The thesis I adopt here borrows very little from genetics. The Portuguese are culturally streamlined for [...]
Around 1956 my father Cyril Carney and my mother Pat were relocated by the Foreign Office to Macau on the mainland of China. Few people knew much about Macau in those days. I imagine my father was chosen to work there because he was one of the ‘old China hands.’ As a young man he had been posted in the 1930s to China and sent into the heart of this vast country to live with a Chinese family cut off from all other influences until he learned his first thousand Mandarin characters. Then he was returned to Peking were he was a very junior member of the Consular service. There he met my mother and they married and he was posted to Tsingtao. We (my twin sister and I) were born in Tsingtao in 1939 and the city was already in the hands of the Japanese though at that time they had not yet turned upon the [...]
