| On December 20,1999, Macau, a city in southern China that had been governed by Portugal for 450 years, was returned to Chinese administration. The decade-long transition era prior to the handover was a period of rapid change and uncertainty, as Macau's 450,000 residents faced simultaneous preparations for the departure of one state and the construction of a new one in its place, the integration into the Chinese nation-state under the principles of “one country, two systems,” as well as an accelerated rate of integration into a transnational economy shaken by the Asian financial crisis. During this period, the Macau-Portuguese state mounted a massive effort to instill in Macau residents a sense that they were possessed of a “unique cultural identity”—defined as a hybrid resulting from 400 years of peaceful commercial and cultural exchange between Chinese and Portuguese people—and that this identity could form the foundation that would allow the city and its residents to emerge prosperous from this period of radical change. This project, based on over two years (1997–1999 and summer 2000) of fieldwork in Macau, is an investigation of this attempt to bring Macau into existence in a particular way in a place and a time on the geographical, temporal and conceptual margins of sovereignty. As such, it challenges programmatic statements about the disjunctures of globalization and the nature of colonialism, and about the relationship between culture, the economy, and the state in the construction of collective identities.; How did the state go about attempting to create a collective identity that would be meaningful to the 95% Chinese population of Macau? And how was this attempt was received? I traced answers to these questions by doing fieldwork in domains where this effort made the strangest bedfellows or provoked the greatest controversy. For example, the Macau-Portuguese state's efforts to promote an understanding of Macau history as explicitly not colonial—evident in the brand-new state-run Macau Museum, in the schools where the state tried to introduce Macau history as part of the curriculum, and in the heritage preservation initiative—garnered unexpected support from Beijing, but were hamstrung partly by its own history of laissez-faire colonial policies. Attempts to romanticize Macau's marginality as a source of difference and pride were countered by public outrage over the international media's sensationalized representations of Macau as a lawless and decadent city, and by confusion over how its residents would be defined as future citizens of the Chinese nation-state. Meanwhile, a range of Macau Chinese intellectuals argued that the form that Portuguese colonialism had taken in Macau, rather than creating a hybrid culture, had allowed “traditional” Chinese culture to develop more “naturally,” free from forcible intrusions by states (as in the PRC) or dilution by globalizing economic forces (as in Hong Kong). By presenting these competing interpretations of the locus, nature and basis of Macau's unique identity, the dissertation demonstrates, first, how divergent appeals to culture as the basis collective identity involved divergent interpretations of history, of colonialism, and of the usefulness of “identity” as a way of organizing and expressing collective difference; and second, how such appeals gained power and persuasiveness insfoar as they were able to accommodate these ambivalent and contradictory intepretations of the past and its relation to the future. |
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