Macau Business has just celebrated its fifth anniversary and now enters its sixth year of publication. Man, what a ride!
When we started along this long and, sometimes bumpy but often so rewarding road, we never thought we’d set some records, make so many new friends and provoke quite a few sulks, to say the least.
In 2004, thanks to a determined group of friends and collaborators who believed in the project, I had the honour of launching the first commercial private publication in English, that didn’t die within the first year.
At the time, we published 52 pages with just a handful of news professionals with little experience in business management. It was, and still is, professional members of the press, without official subsidies or participation from outside companies or business people – or any other groups, for that matter – who make up on our small team of social capital.
Over the past five years we have grown to our current 132 monthly pages – sometimes with double editions – and we were the first ever Macau publication to be sold in all of Hong Kong’s international bookstores. We also believe it would be hard to top our more than 2,000 worldwide subscribers, from Singapore to the United States, from Australia to Portugal, from Norway (yes, I was also surprised!) to England, Malaysia and, of course, China.
In this small media group we are firm believers in freedom of expression, and how important constructive criticism is to the maturity of societies, even if, sometimes, that criticism has to be harsh, because some social sectors tend to maintain the posture of the blind, the deaf and the mute.
In these past years, we have discovered that posturing is not adequate and is of no help to our society, all it does is allow certain elites to cling to a kind of tribal power that is no longer justifiable.
In this media group, we believe good examples should be trumpeted and that good will and good projects should be recognised and stimulated. On countless occasions, we have covered them and, in the coming years, we hope to continue to do so.
I acknowledge that, sometimes, it is not easy to stand up to powerful forces—certain deeply rooted political and administrative forces that tend to complicate the job of those who try to get to the bottom of things and present a more clear perception of the multiple realities that make up Macau’s daily life.
It’s not easy to row against a dominating current and reject what is being imposed by less ethical elements, which fail to resist the temptation to financially strangle whoever resists their will. Those people – many of whom didn’t resist the new winds blowing over Macau – have surely realised by now that they’ll never succeed in doing it to us. Fortunately, they won’t succeed in doing it to others either.
Today, Macau has a new generation of leaders, with different values, other influences and more open mentalities, already hard at work to impose a new way of behaving. That generation needs support in the struggle between those who pretend not to notice what happens in Macau and those who act with conviction and responsibility.
We are happy to hear the candidate for Chief Executive, Fernando Chui Sai On, say that, if he’s elected, total transparency will be the norm. That, in itself, is an implicit censure of the team who have ruled Macau so far, of which we must point out, the candidate was a part of.
We want to believe in Chui Sai On, but we can’t help thinking that this is more of the same old, tired political propaganda. Over the past decade we would have liked to have seen the former secretary invest more in public healthcare, when everyone knew about his family’s ties to Kiang Wu hospital. No-one had access to the results of a comprehensive study about the state of healthcare that cost millions to carry out. There were no consequences after large amounts of money were wasted on the construction of sports structures for the East Asia Games. This spending created strong suspicions of deficient public management.
Still, we like to believe that past mistakes do not impede good future actions. We’ll be here to help society understand the good and the not-so-good, whether it be Chui Sai On or another chief executive.
We rejoiced in the support given to local heritage and the classification of several monuments as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. We stood up for gaming liberalisation and supported the attempts to reposition Macau as a player in the difficult and competitive area of services, essentially in entertainment tourism, conventions and the environment. With the same conviction, we’ll stand against those who yield to corporate pressures that are clearly against Macau’s best interests.
Obviously, as we enter the sixth year of publication, we count on the support, and criticism, of the thousands of readers who buy Macau Business or who read the magazine in the best hotels in town where they stay, aboard the vessels that connect us to Hong Kong, and aboard local airlines.
For many years to come, the Macau Business team promises to be more uncompromising, more irreverent and conscientious.
We sincerely hope we can live up to your expectations.

by: Paulo A. Azevedo