Negotiating Macau

The Macau handover negotiations lasted nine months, and for Augusto Santos Silva they became “a landmark in the history of Portuguese diplomacy”. three decades later, They Also contributed to the election of António Guterres as Secretary-General of the United Nations.

 

 

It might all go wrong. Such was the sentiment on Portugal’s side of the table, when on June 30, 1986 the nation sat down with China to begin negotiating the regime change in Macau.

 

Portugal had fallen out of “the habit of contacting the Chinese authorities,” João de Deus Ramos, one of the diplomats who served in the Portuguese delegation, recalls. Not to mention the fact that the two countries’ positions were miles apart; there was little time for negotiation and “their emotional stances were diametrically opposed: China would gain a new territory, and Portugal would lose one”.

 

During the years spanning Mao Zedong’s rise to power in China (1949) and Portugal’s democratic “Carnation” Revolution (April 25, 1974) diplomatic relations had been severed. And then, even after 1974 and the end of Portugal’s authoritarian Second Republic, it would take Lisbon another five years to open its first embassy in Beijing. The estrangement had been such that no one in the postal service had even heard of Putaoya (Mandarin for Portugal), and several diplomatic communiqués ended up on the sorting room floor.

 

First on the agenda was study. “From 1979 until President Ramalho Eanes’ visit to China in 1985, we were very slow learners,” the diplomat said at Lisbon’s Museu do Oriente during a conference commemorating the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Sino-Portuguese Joint Declaration on the Question of Macau, which established the terms for the transfer of sovereignty of the territory. It was during Eanes’ visit that Beijing formally stated its desire to begin negotiations. Back in Portugal, public opinion was taken by surprise, and the government began to make preparations. Ambassador Rui Medina (1925–2012) was chosen to lead a delegation to include – in addition to João de Deus Ramos – then Consul-General in Hong Kong Nuno Lorena, José Henriques de Jesus (as a delegate for Prime Minister Cavaco Silva) and Carlos Gaspar (as a delegate for President Mário Soares). The Portuguese Ambassador in Beijing, Octávio Neto Valério, consulted, and António Vitorino, then Deputy Secretary for the Governor of Macau, undertook the legal work from the back office.

 

 

“It was at this point that Rui Medina brought out books, briefs from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archive, and a small handbook on Chinese negotiating tactics,” João de Deus Ramos said. The handbook, Chinese Political Negotiating Behavior 1967–1984, was written by Richard Solomon, a former staff member of the United States National Security Council, and was published by the think tank RAND Corporation in 1985 in support of the State Department. Originally classified as a secret document, it was partially declassified ten years later under the Freedom of Information Act during a court case brought by the Los Angeles Times. 

 

In it, Solomon states that while the Chinese approach to negotiation draws on Western practice and the Marxist-Leninist tradition, its “most distinctive qualities, however, are based on China’s own cultural tradition and political practices”. Most distinctive among them is “the effort to develop and manipulate strong interpersonal relationships with foreign officials – a pattern termed here ‘the games of guanxi’, or relationship games”. 

 

This approach stems from the Confucian tradition as applied to politics. Solomon writes: “The Chinese distrust impersonal or legalistic negotiations. Thus, in managing a negotiation they attempt to identify a sympathetic counterpart official in a foreign government and work to cultivate a personal relationship, a sense of ‘friendship’ (you-yi) and obligation; they then attempt to manipulate feelings of goodwill, obligation, guilt, or dependence to achieve their negotiating objectives.”

 

The Chinese are “skilled” at doing two things, he stresses: protracting a negotiation and resisting exposure of their own position until their counterparts’ stance is fully known. There are other typical characteristics: they always seek to conduct the negotiations on Chinese territory, where they can guarantee the “meticulous orchestration of hospitality”. 

 

And there are the classic pressure tactics: always striving to put an interlocutor on the defensive and make him feel he has minimal control over the negotiating process. They are also “skilled at making a foreign counterpart appear to be the supplicant or demandeur in the relationship”. 

 

What is more, after the “friend” card they play the victim. “The essential quality of Chinese pressure tactics is to make the foreign negotiator […] feel that his positive relationship with China is in jeopardy, that he has not done enough to warrant being considered an ‘old friend’.” One of the guidelines offered in the handbook is this: “Resist the idea of being an ‘old friend’ or the sentimentality that Chinese hospitality readily evokes.”

 

“We had all read that handbook, and when the negotiations were underway, in fact all of it was right there,” João de Deus Ramos recounted in a conference organised by the Fundação Oriente, the Portuguese Institute of International Relations at Nova University of Lisbon and the Diplomatic Institute in the Portuguese Foreign Ministry. “Nevertheless, we fell into that language of ‘my old friend’; ‘this is just my personal opinion’; never reaching a conclusion on anything in a meeting, leaving everything for the next one; when we wanted to delay, they were in a hurry; when we wanted to close, they delayed. Chinese negotiators are very skilled.”

 

But in these negotiations – which on April 13 ,1987 ushered in a new era in diplomatic relations between the two countries – Portugal had two things in their favour.

 

One was Macau’s political value. “It’s plain to see: the Chinese being who they are and then us over here, this little seaside nation – but when it came to Macau, the asymmetry changed,” Carlos Gaspar told the conference. “For China, resolution of the Macau question was a critical objective, crucial for the unity of a Greater China. We knew heads could roll. Macau was more important to China than it was to Portugal.”

 

 

Time was the other factor. With the 13th National Congress of the Communist Party of China looming on the horizon that autumn, they wanted everything resolved within two to three months. In 1984, China had negotiated with the United Kingdom for the handover of Hong Kong – slated for 1997 – and they wanted to “close” on Macau as quickly as possible. “The Chinese were in a hurry, and they had a deadline: September 1987,” Gaspar recounted. “And we were asking ourselves, ‘But what’s the rush?’”

 

Portugal saw this haste as a positional advantage. As far as Lisbon was concerned, the date was irrelevant. “For us the issue was resolved in 1976, on recognising that Macau was Chinese territory under Portuguese administration,” the former European commissioner and former Portuguese national defence minister António Vitorino said. “What we wanted was to guarantee the best possible constitution for the local population.”

 

During the first round of negotiations – in Beijing, of course – the Chinese had proposed Macau’s handover be enacted together with Hong Kong’s. “But the only date we were not prepared to accept was one shared with Hong Kong,” Gaspar relates. It was a point of political pride and a question of honour. Hong Kong’s date had nothing to do with Portugal, and everything to do with the treaties between London and Beijing. And relations between Portugal and China were autonomous, not an extension of British imperialism.

 

This was the first surprise dealt to the Chinese. Portugal rejected the proposal, arguing that it was “unfair” and “discriminatory” for Macau’s handover to be less significant than Hong Kong’s, and they used what Vitorino calls “the Calimero argument” (after the diminutive cartoon chicken): “You’re only saying this because we’re small. You wouldn’t be doing this if we were the English.” It was an argument that “might not stand up to repeated use but did have an impact”. The Chinese were loath to give anyone the idea they had separate standards for the Portuguese and for the British.

 

Henriques de Jesus adds to the story: “Hearing the word ‘no’ is one of the worst things that can happen to any negotiator. We must try to get inside the adversary’s head to understand when they are about to give us a ‘no’ and try to anticipate that and prevent them from ever uttering that ‘no’. I went to hear the Chinese side, and they insisted the handover must not occur past the end of the century.”

 

When António Barreto wrote an article suggesting Macau’s handover be conducted symbolically on the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Portuguese explorer Jorge Álvares in Macau – crossing a red line for Beijing – “China immediately sent a minister to Lisbon to say that was out of the question,” Gaspar recalled. “And negotiations were suspended.”

 

During that first stage the atmosphere was tense, and at night in their hotel room, the Portuguese negotiators turned the air conditioning and fans up as high as they would go and spoke quickly, fearing potential audio surveillance, the goal being to make the translators’ jobs as difficult as possible.

 

João de Deus Ramos believes China underestimated Portugal. In his book Em Torno da China – Memórias Diplomáticas (“On China: A Diplomatic Memoir”, Caleidoscópio, 2016), the diplomat writes that the Chinese must have been expecting “a straightforward process” in negotiations with the Portuguese. Even in Portugal, Henriques de Jesus adds, there were those who were convinced the Portuguese delegation had been sent to Beijing with “nothing more than a better-translated version of China’s original proposals”. 

 

China’s Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs Zhou Nan, who had led the Hong Kong negotiations and now led those over Macau, “must have intimated to his superiors that, after England, Portugal would be an ‘open and shut case’”. In the third round, “though the parties still had no idea what each other’s bottom line might be,” Ramos writes, Beijing proposed that the handover take place in 1998. The atmosphere lightened shortly thereafter, when Lisbon accepted the year 2000 as a limit. In the end December 1999 was chosen. 

 

 

 

It was time at last to deal with the substantive issues. Nationality was the most complex. It was already clear the two countries’ legal frameworks were not compatible, and China, unlike Portugal, would not accept dual citizenship. The agreement that was reached is what “fundamentally distinguishes the Sino-Portuguese and the Sino-British accords,” Gaspar says, in that it guarantees recognised Portuguese nationality to a fifth of Macau’s Chinese population.

 

Henriques de Jesus was always the most optimistic among them. “Thirty years ago, none of us knew China’s future, but because of my experience in Macau, I displayed the greatest confidence. I knew we could trust in the word of the Chinese. They have a saying that once a word is uttered, not even seven horses can hold it back.”

 

In all they were nine frenzied months – four rounds (40 hours at the negotiating table) and 11 work group meetings (another 440 hours).

 

The result? The Joint Declaration signed on April 13, 1987 gave Macau a Western-style framework of rights and freedoms and a consolidated political system, guaranteed the rights of those Chinese interested in maintaining ties with Portugal, contributed to the increase of Portuguese language instruction in China and was the founding principle of a “special and close relationship” between Portugal and China and Portugal and Macau. This summary was offered by the Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Augusto Santos Silva, who, to the surprise of some, added yet another outcome to the list: China’s support of the nomination of António Guterres as Secretary-General of the United Nations.

 

“It was clear that among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council we could count on fierce, committed support [for the nomination of António Guterres] from France and that the second greatest support had come from China. I don’t want to undervalue that of Russia, whose position was clear (‘neither in support, nor hostile’), nor that of the UK or the US, but among the P5, China was one of two nations that offered the most clear and explicit – and early – support for Guterres. We heard two arguments from our Chinese interlocutors: they recognised Portugal as a country with both an active voice and a balanced position – ‘balanced’ was the word we heard most often. 

 

But the Chinese had another specific argument: ‘We’ve known you for 500 years, we negotiated the Joint Declaration on Macau together, and you’ve honoured all your commitments. Everything you said you’d do, you’ve done. You’re a country we trust’.”