Democracy referendum

There is a new player in the power struggle between the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and the leadership in Beijing: Macau, the former Portuguese colony located around 30 kilometers west of Hong Kong.

Starting next weekend, three civil rights groups, "Macau Conscience", "Open Macau Society" and "Youth Dynamic," are planning to hold an unofficial referendum asking two questions to all those over 16 among the population of 550,000: "Should Macau's Chief Executive be elected by universal suffrage?" and "Do you have confidence in the only candidate for the position of Chief Executive, Chui San On?" The organizations acknowledge that the referendum will not be legally recognized. Despite this, the government of Macau has already denounced the plan as illegal.

Chui San On, or Fernando Chui, has held the position of Chief Executive since 2009. He is running for re-election on August 31 for five more years in office. As in Hong Kong, he will be elected by an electoral committee made up of representatives from social and professional sectors. The committee currently has 400 members in Macau and 1200 in Hong Kong. According to "The Economist" magazine, this is "a rigged committee of worthies," which "weeds out anyone the mainland does not like."

'Beijing ignores activists from Macau'

The basic law for the special administrative region Hong Kong includes an ultimate aim that the head of the government and all government officials should be elected through universal suffrage. Nevertheless, the nomination of candidates should remain the reserve of the election committee – this is currently the dicisive issue in the tensions between the government in Beijing and the activists in Hong Kong. Following lengthy consultations, Beijing announced the election of the Chief Executive will take place in 2017.

There is no such target included in the basic law for Macau. This can be seen as a key difference in the stance of the pro-democracy movements in Macau and Hong Kong. But according to Bill Chou Kwok-ping, a pro-democracy activist and until recently a political scientist at the University of Macau, this legal matter is not the main difference between the two movements. "Beijing basically ignores Macau's activists; Macau's activists are too few in number to be Beijing's formidable foes," said Chou in a DW interview.

In contrast to Hong Kong, the democratic opposition to Beijing has only recently started developing. Chu Hin Long, a journalist from Hong Kong, explained the difference between the two groups: "In Macau, the handover to China (in 1999) was generally welcomed – the Portuguese administration had a poor reputation, crime rates were high and so on. When I traveled to Macau on a research trip 15 or 16 years ago, there was only one official in the legislative assembly (Legco) in the pro-democracy camp. He was totally isolated," Chu told DW.

Capital city of gambling

Hong Kong's population is around 13 times the size of Macau's, yet its economy is only around six times the size of Macau's. In spite of a current downturn in the casino industry as a result of Chinese anti-corruption campaigns, experts say that Macau's economy is on course to grow. The tiny territory has recently replaces replaced Las Vegas as the gambling capital of the world. In 2013, the industry turned over 38 billion dollars – six times as high as the turnover in Las Vegas. American casino owners, who also operate in Macau, believe that they can reach the 100 billion dollar mark.

But Macau's democracy activists are not letting such rosy growth prospects distract them. They are demanding more political participation for citizens. "The casino-based economic boom increases social disparity," says political scientist Chou Kwok-ping. He believes the reason his contract at the University of Macau was not renewed has to do with his pro-democracy activities. "More and more people are disillusioned that economic success doesn't necessarily lead to better livelihood. Mass protests become more frequent and bigger in scale than before," Chou said. "If the trend continues and the public become aware of the links between their grievances with the political system, many of them will join the democratic movement," he is convinced.

Macau in a difficult position for reforms

Chu, a journalist from Hong Kong, is not so sure. "In Hong Kong, the pro-democracy movement has had a hard time over the last 15 years, although public opinion leans strongly in the direction of democracy and universal suffrage." For this reason Chu believes that in the case of Macau, which has traditionally had stronger ties with Beijing than Hong Kong, it is unlikely that the pro-democracy movement will be able to put down strong roots.

For both Chu from Hong Kong and Chou from Macau, prospects are bleak for the introduction of universal suffrage and equal voting rights. "As long as various factions in Communist Party of China remain in solidarity and oppose Western-style democracy, the prospects of the democracy movement in the two cities are gloomy," Bill Chou Kwok-ping added.