Global Constitutional Narratives of Autonomous Regions

The Constitutional History of Macau

Jason Buhi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000369519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

With international attention focused on Hong Kong, many forget that Macau also exists in a delicate "one country, two systems" (OCTS) balance with mainland China. This book provides insights into the circumstances surrounding the less-understood half of China's OCTS policy, including the stagnation of representational government, and the location of any Macau characteristics in the Macau Basic Law.

Despite being Hong Kong's sister "Special Administrative Region" (SAR) within the People's Republic of China, Macau's unique constitutional development under Portuguese and Chinese administration remains under-appreciated despite its potential contributions to local, national, and international constitutional discourse. Utilizing a multidisciplinary approach, including doctrinal, historical, and comparative methodologies, this work fills that gap. The research blends Portuguese, Chinese, and foreign-language sources in order to reconstruct a balanced constitutional narrative. The book focuses on a consequential effect of globalization – that is, the assimilation of a long-standing and unique constitutional order by a new hegemonic sovereign – including processes for internationalization as China opened up, legal harmonization of two distinct legal and socioeconomic orders, juridification of local affairs with the establishment of a new local court system in preparation for handover to the Chinese regime, and democratization (or the lack thereof) among the various communities comprising the Macanese polity before and since.

Focusing on Macau's unique development at the crux of European and Chinese empires, and the role it plays as a mirror for Chinese intentions vis-a-vis Hong Kong today, the book will be of interest to those working in constitutional law, politics, and history.

1 The entrepȏt of Eurasia

1533–1622

1.1 Introduction

This chapter begins the exploration of the modern history of Macau by focusing upon its initial settlement. Global destiny took a fateful turn in 1553 when Chinese officials in Guangdong Province allowed Portuguese merchants to establish a trading outpost on a narrow isthmus. Macau soon blossomed into an economic and cultural entrepôt, the hub of a Maritime Silk Road that connected Asia and Europe. This chapter assesses constitutional development during that earliest period of history, from dual incorporation as a Portuguese and Chinese municipality, and the unusual establishment of a local Senate that would bear primary responsibility for governing the city for almost 300 years.

1.2 First settlement

The Macau Basic Law begins by asserting that “Macau, including the Macau Peninsula, Taipa Island and Coloane Island, has been part of the territory of China since ancient times […].”¹ Indeed, the deep sand of Coloane's Hac Sa Beach contains evidence of human activity dating back to the second millennium BCE, and Chinese claims of territorial hegemony have been proffered back almost as far.² That inconspicuous landmass – a peninsula and group of small islands originally measuring only 2.8 km² – however, would have been largely indistinguishable from the thousands of other protrusions and islets dotting the expansive Guangdong coastline before permanent human settlement.

The first band of permanent settlers appears to have been refugees fleeing the collapse of the Southern Song Dynasty in the 1270s. Around the same time, a foundational myth asserts that a trading junk from Fujian Province was serendipitously guided through a deadly storm by the ocean goddess A-Ma, whose name was later transliterated to Macau. It landed safely upon a portion of the southern shore of the Macau peninsula now known as the Barra, where an ancient temple still stands to honor the goddess's divine charity. The area became such a haven for outlaws and pirates during the Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368) that the first Ming emperor decreed that adjacent islands be kept vacant. That order did not extend to the Macau peninsula itself, where a Fujianese community grew in the south near Barra, and a northern Chinese community grew in the north near Mongha throughout the early and middle Ming Dynasty (1368–1644).³

Nevertheless, Macau was sparsely populated and loosely administered until the Portuguese arrived. Both Portugal and Spain decided to seek naval passage to Asia due to the length and hazards of the land journey. A bilateral treaty was approved by the Vatican, effectively instructing the Spanish to sail west to the Americas, and the Portuguese to sail east around Africa, in order to reduce the potential for skirmishes between the two rival Catholic kingdoms.⁴

Generations of successive Portuguese explorers made a series of previously uncharted voyages around the Cape of Good Hope, past Persia, and into East Asian waters, establishing numerous small settlements along the way in a manner poetically described by Lindsay Ride as “stringing them on her long sea lanes like beads on a rosary.”⁵ Vasco da Gama led them to Goa by 1502, and Afonso de Albuquerque captured Malacca in 1511, where the Portuguese first encountered Chinese merchants. Albuquerque's junior officer, Jorge Alvares, would lead the first expedition to China in 1513, establishing first contact on a sour note.⁶

Portugal's first diplomatic mission to Beijing collapsed in 1521 when news reached the capital that an imperious Portuguese officer assaulted a Chinese subject at a small trading post of Guangdong.⁷ This news served to confirm negative rumors about the Portuguese arriving from conquered Malacca, and so the members of Portugal's mission were unceremoniously evicted from Beijing, jailed at Guangzhou, and ultimately died in captivity.⁸ Meanwhile, conservative elements won over the provincial authorities, and Guangdong closed its ports to all foreign trade. When they reopened in 1529, a prohibition against trade with the “Franges” – as the Portuguese were then known to the Chinese – was stipulated.⁹

1.2.1 The Sino-Portuguese Trade Agreement of 1553

The Portuguese returned to the South China Sea in 1549 under the command of an older and wiser admiral named Leonel de Sousa, who found that the situation remained unchanged:

And [the Emperor] ordered that all kinds of merchants should be allowed to enter and pay duties except the “Franges” who were men of ill will, who are the Portuguese, and he considered them thieves and troublemakers who disregarded the laws of his Kingdom.¹⁰

After failing to establish themselves elsewhere, Sousa's fleet anchored off Guangdong. Sousa gave strict orders that his men not go ashore or cause any disturbance while he negotiated with local authorities. He identified his negotiating partner as the Haidao, or “Admiral of the Seas,” but did not refer to him by name.¹¹ Subsequent Chinese accounts identify him as the Deputy Surveillance Commissioner of Guangdong Province, named Wang Bai.¹²

The two men struck a deal. The terms of the Sino-Portuguese Trade Agreement were not officially exchanged,¹³ but Sousa sent a detailed chronicle of the negotiations back to Prince Luis, the younger brother of King John III of Portugal.¹⁴ Its pertinent terms are that Sousa (1) renounced any association with the previous Franges, (2) pledged to pay the 20% customs tax paid by other foreign merchants, and (3) gained permission for Portuguese merchants to trade at Guangzhou.¹⁵ A probable reason that the agreement was not put to paper was because the clinching provision regarded “various points of honor:”

[T]hey [the Chinese] wished to receive gifts concealed because there are severe penalties for accepting bribes. Thus they are very silent about anything I might bring to them. But they mentioned that if I were a Captain of Merchants sent by Her Highness that I might show some evidence of the fact. They maintained that they are not at all acquainted with the foreigners but that they would be satisfied to recognize me as Captain of Her Majesty if they were to receive adequate compliments and courtesies which could guarantee me complete justice for the Portuguese and all other people who might come under banner. That these courtesies having been observed, I would find no complaints, that I would in the future only have to send a Portuguese to ask permission which the Haidao would be pleased to grant. And thus it was in this way that I arranged peace with China and am honored as a merchant.¹⁶

Sousa failed to win two terms he desired: a reduced taxation rate of 10% and the release of Portuguese prisoners held at Guangzhou.¹⁷ Thus, there would be no preferential tax treatment or mercy for violation of Chinese law, let alone extraterritorial application of Portuguese law. Chinese sources, including The Chronicles of Guangdong Province, subsequently verified the basic terms of the agreement:

In Jiaijng 32 (1553), some foreigners came to Haojing by ships, saying they wanted to borrow some land to sun their goods, which were tribute and had got wet when the ships cracked in a storm. The Deputy Surveillance Commissioner Wang Bai approved it because he was bribed.¹⁸

Fei thus concludes that the Portuguese “did not invade or occupy in 1553 or 1554 as some Chinese scholars have claimed in recent years,”¹⁹ contrary to the Macau Basic Law's opening assertion that “was gradually occupied by Portugal after the mid-16th century.” The bribes continued until 1574, when their payment was exposed to higher Chinese authorities and subsequently recast as “land rent,” codifying the provisions of Leonel de Sousa's account relating to “various points of honor.”

1.2.2 Agreeable topography

The Portuguese were permitted to stay at Macau because of its advantageous geography for both sides.

From the Chinese perspective, Macau was isolated, infertile, and indefensible. The original peninsula extended south from Guangdong Province via a thin bar of sand roughly “two kilometers long and ten meters wide, like the stalk of a lotus.”²⁰ One can still trace the subtle topography of the natural surface, the hills of which rise gently between the flat strips of modern reclamation. At the peninsula end of the now forgotten “stalk” stands the small mountain known as Mongha, where the Song refugees settled, while another larger slope known as the Monte Hill commands the center of the lower half of the peninsula. Though they could provide some cover to ships in the harbor, neither hill was ever capable of mounting an effective defense against a Chinese army. Furthermore, the remaining bits of surrounding land were unsuitable for farming, rendering the Portuguese inhabitants dependent on their hosts for sustenance.

The Portuguese were willing to take what they could get. Macau may have been devoid of most natural resources, but it did have potable water from underground springs, as well as esthetics. Below the peninsula, four islands faced each other in two pairs forming the shape of a cross. Then an auspicious omen for the Catholic settlers, none of those cross-shaped islands exist in recognizable form today, sacrificed via reclamation to the perceived needs of regional development.

The first Portuguese settlement began on the Patane Hill, near the modern-day Camões Grottoes, as the Inner Harbor provided better shelter from typhoon winds. They established their first church, St. Anthony's, on its present spot in 1558. In time, they spread south toward the Monte Hill, eventually connecting with the Fujian community that sprawled north from the Barra.²¹ Their intersection was at the Poco de Lilau, a freshwater well used by both communities.²² Father Benjamin Videira Pires asserted that the maintenance of the A-Ma Temple and St. Paul's Church evinces Portuguese and Fujianese unity in “a kind of oceanic nomadism, which was, above all, spiritual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Legal table
• Macau population table
• Glossary
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1 The entrepȏt of Eurasia (1533–1622)
• 2 The democratic citadel (1623–1783)
• 3 The era of imperial consolidation (1783–1845)
• 4 The early colonial era (1846–1909)
• 5 The middle colonial/republican period (1910–1930)
• 6 The late colonial period (1930–1966)
• 7 The handover era (1966–1999)
• 8 The special administrative region (1999–2049)
• Epilogue
• Bibliography of major works cited
• Index