Known quantity

Macau’s chief citizen-elect knows his way around the system

Who is Mr Chui and for what does he stand? According to some local media analysis he is the archetypal Macau insider. The soubriquet ‘safe pair of hands’ may be stretching things a little given his performance over the East Asian Games budget. Mr Chui is, however, a member of one of the aforementioned business families that pretty much ran Macau during the Portuguese administration and have continued to do so since the handover.

Mr Chui’s late uncle was a leading supporter of the Communist Party during the final decades of Portuguese administration leading up to the handover in 1999. That may make Beijing feel a little warmer and fuzzier about Mr Chui than it does, say, about Donald Tsang in Hong Kong. Mr Tsang, after all, wears a bow tie (a classic symbol of Western bourgeois values) and was a career civil servant during the British administration. It would be a surprise if Mr Chui did not have highly placed supporters in Beijing. Having good political contacts is as essential for doing business in China as it is in the West. The difference in the West is that the contacts with politicians are often done through professional lobbyists.

Macau’s ultimate insider, Dr Stanley Ho, has declared his support for Mr Chui’s candidacy. If Dr Ho’s long and successful career has proven anything, it’s that he knows how to spot and back a winner. Such support does, though, carry its own burdens. One would need to be a strong personality to be willing to risk disappointing Dr Ho on any policy making issue touching on the casino industry after such an endorsement.

New team

At a press conference following the Macau election announcement, Mr Chui said he planned to begin work on forming his new administration in readiness for when Mr Ho steps down at the end of his term in December. Mr Chui did not go into specifics regarding any policy initiatives he may have in mind.

Tough decisions and a long view may well be required from Macau’s new boss, rather than more of the same. The incumbent Edmund Ho has been strong on policy regarding physical infrastructure (building roads, museums, public squares, etc.), but has shown less inclination to redesign in any radical way the taxation system or the management of the territory’s human capital.

Some may think radicalism is overrated. No professional politician in the West seems able to resist the lure of change for change’s sake, but few professional business people seem enthusiastically to court it. The fact that both the outgoing and incoming chief executives, Edmund Ho and Mr Chui, are businessmen rather than professional politicians may be a cause for celebration among Macau’s casino operators—especially when they think of their experiences of dealing with politicians in their home markets.

There are, however, some things to be said in support of radicalism. One is that it not only embraces, but also on occasion initiates, socially useful change. Strong, opinionated politicians are often more closely in touch with the public mood than business lobbyists and can on occasion save business people from their own folly. That was unfortunately not the case in the US, where senior executives in the car industry successfully lobbied the Bush administration to be allowed to continue building gas-guzzling pick-up trucks. Now, during a recession, no one wants to buy them.