Jigsaw pieces

Last week, this newspaper reported on putative plans by the Macau SAR Government to expand the current facilities of the Lotus Border, which links the city to Hengqin Island. According to Macau Business Daily reporters, the reasons that have encouraged the government to toy with this idea purportedly include the relentless development of Cotai and the expectation of welcoming greater numbers of visitors to the city, especially following the changing profile of Macau’s gaming market – moving from higher to lower floors – which means that more people will cross the border to Cotai more often, though likely with less money to spend.
Another important element underlying the yet-to-be-approved project was raised: the need to ease demographic pressure on the Gongbei Border Gate during peak tourist dates – which in Macau, let’s face it, could be almost every day. Similar to the Border Gate, the new Lotus checkpoint, if erected, would be able to deal with 300,000 visitors per day. That’s roughly half the population of Macau. On a single day.
The new Pac-On ferry terminal falls neatly into the same logic: larger infrastructure is planned and built in order to manage larger flows – people, cars, and goods – which reciprocate broader economic and political ideologies that eventually materialise into a certain type of spatial grandeur, which, in Macau, is ambitious yet puzzling.
To give all this the benefit of the doubt, it is thoughtful reasoning on the part of local and central authorities to consider channelling mass tourism to Cotai rather than continue to overload the busiest checkpoint between Macau and the Mainland, north of the Peninsula. Limiting human and car crossings back and forth across the Border Gate would improve its service to residents and visitors alike, matching flows to a degree more suitable to the Gongbei Border’s current capacity – recall that the facilities were already expanded in 2004 in view of the enactment of the Individual Visa Scheme in 2003.
It would also allow the Peninsula to exhale, releasing residents from much daily trouble and, to be honest, unnecessary, pain, given the liberating possibilities other borders allow us to entertain. Having said that, there is as yet no confirmation that the Lotus Border has been earmarked for expansion. Just another of those now typical ways of dealing with development in Macau: behind-closed-doors processes of decision-making which force us to figure out the hidden aspects of policy for action, like jigsaw puzzle pieces slowly falling into place.