Regional Outlook : Portugal Takes New Interest in an Old Colony : After years of neglect tiny holding get ruler's attention as Chinese takeover nears.

By RONE TEMPEST

April 4, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MACAO —

In a Portuguese colonial empire that once included Brazil, Angola and Mozambique, the colony of Macao--an isthmus on the Chinese mainland and a pair of flyspeck islands in the Pearl River estuary--was a long-neglected outpost inhabited by second-rate Portuguese military officers, opium traders, gamblers, hookers and a handful of studious Jesuit clerics.

The poet W.H. Auden’s line about Macao was that “nothing serious could happen here.”

Macao’s reputation was so seedy that in 1975, Portugal asked China to take the colony off its hands, and Chinese Communist leaders Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai declined the offer. A deal was finally struck to turn Macao over to China by the end of 1999, 2 1/2 years after the British are to have given back Hong Kong to China.

But a funny thing has happened on the way to the historic hand-over.

After years of neglecting Macao, the Portuguese suddenly have become fond of their forgotten colonial stepchild, their last overseas possession. The anti-colonial passions that ignited a 1974 left-wing coup d’etat in Portugal have faded, replaced by a bittersweet nostalgia for the days of empire.

After the fire sale of colonial possessions that saw Portugal, in quick succession, give up claims on Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Timor, the Portuguese awoke one day to find only one remaining, ridiculously small possession still in their control--Macao.

“We have been around here for nearly 500 years,” said Joao Mira Gomes, diplomatic adviser to the Portuguese governor of Macao, “but until 1975 our main focus was Africa and, 200 years before that, Brazil. Macao came on center stage quite late.”

More recently, the mainland Chinese economy has taken off like a rocket, increasing Macao’s value as a launching pad for outsiders seeking business operations in China. As a result, with only four years left in their four-century run as Macao’s rulers, the Portuguese are engaged in a frantic effort to cement cultural, linguistic and economic ties with the colony’s 400,000 people, most of whom do not speak a single word of Portuguese or know the difference between vino verde and Vitalis.

“What we are fighting for is to keep Macao with its own identity,” said Antonio Salavessa da Costa, Macao’s government secretary for communication, tourism and culture.

The main fear, said Gary Ngai Mei-Cheong, vice president of the Cultural Institute of Macao, is that Macao will disappear into the booming neighboring Chinese city of Zhuhai in 1999, erasing 442 years of Portuguese presence.

“Zhuhai is developing so fast. There is a danger of being swallowed up and losing our identity,” Ngai said. “The only way out for Macao in 1999 is to develop our sense of cultural identity as a strong Latin culture with a different way of living, what makes up the uniqueness of Macao.”

To try to instill some sense of Portuguese-tinged “Macaoness” in the population under the fading light of empire, the Portuguese administration has launched a flurry of cultural programs and historical preservation projects.

Chinese students are encouraged to study Portuguese and other European languages. More than 200 Portuguese and Italian style buildings, ranging from the grand Bela Vista Hotel on Penha Hill to Santa Casa da Misercordia, Macao’s first hospital, have been declared historical landmarks and restored. The center of the old city has been cleared of vehicles and paved with mosaic ceramic tile imported from the Portuguese homeland.

Meanwhile, the government has appealed to its southern European cousins--the Italians, French and Spanish--to help focus on Macao as the last bastion of European culture on the Chinese mainland.

Ngai, an Indonesian-born linguist who has mastered nine languages, including English and Portuguese, dreams of developing Macao as a European study center and database for both Chinese and European scholars.

“We can be a window into Latin countries for China and a gateway into China for Europe and Latin America,” he said. “This is the only way we can survive that is different from Hong Kong and different from Zhuhai.”

Macao is set to be turned over to the People’s Republic of China on Dec. 20, 1999----two years, five months and 20 days after Hong Kong reverts to mainland control.

Like Hong Kong, Macao has been promised 50 years of “autonomy” by the Communist regime and has been told that it can keep its capitalist economy under the “one country, two systems” concept endorsed by Beijing.

So far the Portuguese have managed the return of Macao in a much less confrontational style than has the British administration of Hong Kong. Critics describe the Portuguese administration as overly passive--bordering on collaborationist--with the Beijing regime. The Portuguese counter that they have been in East Asia twice as long as the British and are simply more attuned to how things work.

“Portugal has been here since the 16th Century,” said Salavessa da Costa, the government secretary. “We came as traders and worked with the Chinese. The British have been here only 250 years. They came in by force.”

In recent times, the Portuguese won favor with the Chinese by refusing to accept fleeing political dissidents after the bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tian An Men Square. In another notorious case, the Macao police have been accused of illegally allowing the extradition of Australian businessman James Peng to the mainland. Peng, accused in China of financial irregularities, is now in a Chinese jail.

Compared to Hong Kong’s still lively press, where newspapers and magazines boldly criticize Beijing, Macao’s press is relatively tame, seldom printing negative stories about its huge neighbor.

The money-losing television and radio network, Teledifusao de Macau, is partly owned by the Nam Kwong Group, the de facto trade mission from China. Other owners include Stanley Ho, the gambling magnate whose exclusive contract to run all gambling in Macao runs for two years after the 1999 return, and Edmund Ho (no relation), who is one of Macao’s representatives at the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp national Parliament.

Gambling, legalized in the late 19th Century to help raise money for the development of Timor--a Portuguese colony in the Malay archipelago that has since been annexed by Indonesia--is still a mainstay of the Macao economy, providing half of the tax revenue and a fourth of Macao’s $6-billion gross domestic product.

Increasingly, said Kingsley Kong Kuai Sang, an executive with gambling magnate Ho’s Sociedade de Turismo e Diversoes de Macao, the clients flocking into Macao to bet money on the high stakes baccarat tables are from the mainland. “It was about 20% of our business last year,” he said.

Evidence of this flood of mainland gamblers, mostly from neighboring Guangdong province, can be found not only here in Macao but on the courthouse walls of many Chinese cities within a radius of several hundred miles. The posters announce the names and execution dates of Communist Party officials who absconded with money from their work units and lost it on the tables of the gaudy Lisboa Hotel casino in Macao.

Hong Kong tourists and residents, just 35 miles away across the mouth of the Pearl River and 50 minutes by hydrofoil, are also steady customers of the colony’s gaming tables, as well as its calmer lifestyle.

Stanley Ho, 73, realizes that the fate of his nine casinos on Macao depends on his good relations with the Beijing government. Like many leading Macao business people, he has chosen to go along in order to get along. In addition to hotels, casinos and the radio and television network, Stanley Ho is one of the principal financial backers of a massive new landfill development under way in the outer harbor of Macao.

The other major individual owner of the Teledifusao de Macau, Edmund Ho, whose Chinese name is Ho Hau-wa, is the son of the late Ho Hin, one of the rich, pro-mainland Macao Chinese known locally as the “red fat cats.” Ho Hin was one of the main leaders in the Macao Chinese community until his death in 1987.

Edmund Ho, 39, who serves as chairman of a major bank and was indirectly elected deputy president of Macao’s legislative assembly, is considered by many to be the front-runner for the territory’s first Chinese governor after 1999.

In fact, Macao’s non-confrontational approach to China won it several concessions from the Communist government.

After a friendly visit to Beijing in November, Macao Gov. Vasco Rocha Viera came back with a promise that China would not install the death penalty in the criminal code of Macao.

Unlike Hong Kong, which fought tooth and nail with the Chinese over the construction of an airport, Macao won easy approval to build a $1-billion international airport on reclaimed land next to Taipa Island, even though the Chinese were already building a huge international airport of their own only a few miles away in Zhuhai.

The main differences between Macao and Hong Kong are ones of scale. With only about six square miles of territory, Macao is dwarfed by a Hong Kong nearly 70 times its size. Its 450,000 people compare to about 6 million for Hong Kong.

Moreover, a much higher percentage of Macao residents--100,000, or nearly 25%--hold Portuguese or European passports that will make it easier for them to leave legally if things go sour after the change than is the case with Hong Kong residents.

In effect, argue the Portuguese, who are proud of their liberal policy on granting citizenship rights to their overseas subjects, it means that most people who want to leave Macao will be able to do so.

This is clearly not the case in Hong Kong, where half of the residents have so-called British National Overseas passports but do not have the right to establish a home in Britain or elsewhere in the European Union. Only a handful have British passports with full rights.

If the Chinese government does not honor its pledge of autonomy to Hong Kong, the result could be a flood of political refugees that Britain and, by extension, members of the European Community may not be prepared to accept.

“Our biggest concern,” said Macao’s mayor, Jose Luis de Sales Marques, “is that Macao might not be able to develop itself and have a sense of place in its own right in the region. The biggest concern is that we might not be able to differentiate ourselves from our neighbors.”

Adding to the problem, said the mayor, who is one of the 10,000 “Maconese” of mixed Portuguese and Chinese blood who have long been the mainstay of the local government here, is that about half of Macao’s population is made up of relatively recent settlers, economic migrants who came to Macao in the last 15 years.

Unlike longer-term Macao residents, these people have fewer cultural ties with the Portuguese past and are therefore more difficult to reach with the recent campaign to identify Macao as a place apart.

“We might question whether they feel the same way as we do,” said the soft-spoken mayor, a studious figure who wears oval wire-frame spectacles.

Of course, there are still places in Macao where one can, with only a little imagination, experience the sense of being in a sleepy, half-forgotten southern European colony.

For example, the old Bela Vista Hotel, halfway up Penha Hill at the tip of the isthmus, has been beautifully renovated and given a bright coat of yellow paint.

But those who take lunch and sip vino verde --green wine--on the Bela Vista’s long terrace can see that Portugal is losing its battle to keep Macao different.

In Praia Grande Bay directly below the hotel is the massive landfill and office-building development that gambling king Stanley Ho is building with mainland partners.

Towering, anonymous glass skyscrapers, indistinguishable from those in neighboring Zhuhai, are sprouting in every direction.

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MACAO VERSUS HONG KONG

Macao is far less populated and less wealthy than its neighboring port.

* Population

Macao: 484,557

Hong Kong: 5.5 million

Gross Domestic Product

Macao: $5.8 billion

Hong Kong: $119 billion (1993)

Religions

Macao: 45% Buddhist, 7% Roman Catholic, 1% Protestant, 1.2% other, 45.8% none