The role of the Portuguese community in Macau, as analysed by the way the interviewees who participated in a recent research see themselves, “has changed due to changes in the conjuncture: more than ever, they say they feel ‘immigrants,’ when in 2013, they said ‘people from Macau’,” notes the study’s author, Inês Branco.
Several factors contributed to the changes that took place over almost a decade, including the events in Hong Kong, but the pandemic was the most significant.
“Not only has the connection to society as a whole been shaken, the maintenance of the connection to Portugal, too. This means that the degree of integration and, more than that, the feeling of being integrated, has decreased in these eight years,” can be read in the paper Os portugueses (ainda) em Macau: uma comunidade em reconstrução [The Portuguese (still) in Macau: a community in reconstruction].
“When exploring the interviewees’ relationship with Macau, the word ‘freedom’ appears in a negative context, unlike what happened in 2013,” the document reads.
“As a result of what has been happening in Hong Kong – the author continues -, those interviewed in this survey reveal that they feel a greater restriction on freedom and that Macau is closer to Chinese nationalist values. Also in relation to freedom of the press, although it is enshrined in the Basic Law, the active presence of the government in the control of journalistic work is increasingly felt.”
Another change from 2013 concerns languages. “Although the English language continues to be the most used in social relations between people from different communities, which is easily explained by the fact that these immigrants continue not to learn Chinese languages, there is an increasing use of Mandarin, the official language of Macau and all of China, in professional relationships,” says the author, affiliated to the Department of Languages, Literature and Culture at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra, Portugal.
This research focuses on the Portuguese community in Macau and follows the results of the initial research carried out in 2013. Inês Branco tries to find out eight years later, what has changed.
By 2013, two events had marked the recent history of the community: the handover of the territory to the People’s Republic of China in 1999 and the financial and economic crisis that began in 2008.
The author reconstructed the initial sample taken in 2013, and conducted eight interviews, trying to create a self-portrait of the Portuguese community, to learn what has changed since 2013, and determine the place of the Portuguese community and language in the local society.
(Branco, Inês, 2022: Os portugueses (ainda) em Macau: uma comunidade em reconstrução, Daxiyangguo, Portuguese Journal of Asian Studies; DOI: 10.33167/1645-4677.DAXIYANGGUO2022.28/pp.51–73)
