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""This book outlines the major social and political changes in the city of Macau during its first 20 years under the "One Country, Two Systems" arrangement with Mainland China. Despite the longstanding image of Macau as Asia's Las Vegas, it is a city that has changed a great deal since its return to China. Equally, despite this return, it retains a unique social, economic and political character, distinct both from the Mainland of China, and from its larger neighbour, Hong Kong. The chapters in this book examine the detail of this uniqueness from a range of perspectives, including the gambling industry, police-society relations, media usage patterns, and protest movements. Analysing the state of affairs 20 years after the return to China, they also attempt to anticipate its future trajectory. A valuable guide for scholars of Asian, and particularly Chinese, urban politics that will be of interest to academics and students looking to better understand the particularities of Macau.""--

This study examines preferences related to democracy and their spillover effects on political trust and political participation through a social survey of Macao's university students. In contrast to conventional measurements that enquire into attitudes towards democracy in abstract terms, this study measures students' preferences related to democracy through their attitudes towards a particular political incident—the Umbrella Movement. A detailed discussion of the Umbrella Movement as a feasible and valid indicator yields the following research findings. First, students in Macao generally approve the demand for universal suffrage made by the Umbrella Movement. This can be interpreted as a preference for a minimal definition of democracy. Second, bivariate and regression analyses demonstrate that a positive correlation exists in students' support level for universal suffrage, corroborating the statement that student leaders in the Umbrella Movement were "fighting for democracy" and the importance of "living in a democratic system". Universal suffrage as an indicator empirically reflects students' attitudes towards democracy. Third, regression analyses also affirm that support for universal suffrage is a statistically significant predictor of students' political trust and political participation. The higher the support that students have for universal suffrage, the higher their likelihood of having less trust in both the Macao government and the central government, and in engaging in unconventional political participation. (China/GIGA)

By examining the origins of Macao's 2014 protest against the Retirement Package Bill, this paper intends to answer whether Macao is encountering a governance crisis like Hong Kong's. Through a careful comparison, it concludes that Macao and Hong Kong are unlikely to follow the same political development trajectory, as there are considerable differences in the level of social mobilization and governmental coercive capacity between the two cities.

AbstractTo what extent do expert opinions affect public opinion in policy making? While most existing studies were conducted in democracies, experts' influence under authoritarian settings is still understudied. This paper examines how expert opinion and vocational affiliation influence public attitudes toward genetically modified (GM) food in China. Through a survey experiment with over 1600 respondents, we find that experts' endorsement can increase policy support for GM food but that their opposition exerts no influence. Different vocational affiliations do not generate significantly different effects, although endorsement from foreign experts has larger effects than endorsement from domestic counterparts, who have closer connections with the Chinese government. We finally discuss the policy implications of expert involvement in policy making and promoting GM food in China based on the above findings.

AbstractCivic education has long been viewed as a political tool to construct identity in nation‐states. This view, however, is complicated by the cases of Hong Kong and Macau. As former colonies and current autonomous regions of China, the two cities went through decolonisation without becoming nation‐states. Does this status affect Hong Kong's and Macau's identity discourses? Are civic textbooks tools to construct or deconstruct a Chinese/national identity? What explains the two cities' different identity discourses? Going beyond the civic–ethnic binary, this article argues that identities in 'postcolonial territorial autonomies', such as Hong Kong and Macau, should be analysed through a multilevel framework of identity/state–society interactions, reflecting the local, national and global forces at play. The interactions of these forces shape Hong Kong's layered identity, Macau's ambiguous identity and the two cities' contradictory attitudes towards colonial legacies. This study contributes to a relational and interactional rethinking of national identity and decolonisation.

This paper examines how Macau, with a different political and legal system under the "one country, two systems" principle, fits into China's securitization and what impact that has on its local governance. We argue that in recent years Macau's legal system has gradually transformed into a means of social control. Through case files related to the Assembly and Demonstration Law drawn from the Court of Final Appeal, we demonstrate that although Macau is unlike Hong Kong, where dissidents are subject to severe repression, Beijing's emphasis on national security has weakened the checks-and-balances function of Macau's legal system and substantially narrowed the scope of freedom of speech, even though it is nominally guaranteed and protected by the Basic Law.