Department of Government and Public Aministration

This article examines the nature of political opposition in the Macao Special Administrative Region (MSAR) to give us an understanding of its role in and approach to political reform in the territory. It explores the emergence of the pro-democracy opposition in Macao since the end of the colonial era and the self-perception of pro-democratic opposition groups in the MSAR regime, and argues that the majority of opposition groups perceive themselves as ‘loyal’ opponents to the current regime. The groups aim at checking the authorities in the scope of the constitution as loyal constituents. Their assumption of this role is the result of several environmental factors, including a relatively weak civil society, a lack of resources and a pro-government media.

Over the last two to three decades, a number of countries in the Global South have become the dominant source of a range of manufactures especially clothing and textiles, footwear, toys and domestic white-goods. Simultaneously, the liberalization of
trade and investment, has effectively added 2 billion to the world labour supply principally in China, Russia and Eastern Europe and Brazil and Argentina. This has been accompanied by an increase in the global labour supply, shifts in the patterns of
finance and a qualitative shift in the method of producing many commodities in the forms of commodity chains. The sheer scale of these changes is bringing workers in different countries into more intense competition with each other with little doubt existing that global employers and investors are able to play-off national work-forces and national labour unions against each other.

The aim of this paper is to assess what has changed in the global political economy and how those changes effect the ability of workers to organize in solidarity with one another. The key questions are who is able to work together, how are they able to work together, and for what conditions? These questions will be examined in light of existing theories on wages and international trade as well as the political responses from the left regarding the question of the most appropriate labour praxis in the global political economy. These include ideas about protectionism, global solidarity and what is termed as defeatism or compromise in the face of global capital. It is argued that
what is required is not only a revised theory of labour in light of the conditions of the global economy, but also revised labour strategies in order to meet the demands of the 21st century.

This paper makes a case for a revision of the theories of labour used to formulate analysis and labour praxis in light of the changes that have marked the final two decades that led to the 21st century. One of the starting points is framework of unequal
exchange as originally put forward by Arghiri Emmanuel, and this paper examines the potential for cooperation between high and low wage country labour forces, those commonly known as the global North and the global South. While the creation of entire
theories of labour and strategies for workers movements remains outside the limitations of this paper, I endeavour to build a foundation by examining the existing theory and practice.

Since the 1980s the locus of manufacturing and some services have moved to countries of the Global South. Liberalization of trade and investment has added two billion people to world labour supply and brought workers everywhere into intense competition with each other. Under orthodox neoliberal and neoclassical approaches free trade and open investment should benefit all countries and lead to convergence. However considerable differences in wages and working hours exist between workers of the Global North and those of the Global South. The organising question for the thesis is why workers in different countries but the same industries get different wages. Empirical evidence reviewed in the thesis shows that productivity does not explain these wage differences and that workers in some parts of the South are more productive than workers in the North. Part of the thesis examines the usefulness of explanations drawn from Marxist, institutionalist and global commodity chain approaches.

There is a long established argument in Marxist and neo-Marxist writings that differences between North and South result from imperialism and the exercise of power. This is the starting point to review ways of understanding divisions between workers as the outcome of a global class structure. In turn, a fault line is postulated between productive and unproductive labour that largely replicates the division between the Global North and the Global South.

Workers and their organizations need shared actions if they are to resist global competition and wage disparities. Solidarity has been the clarion of progressive movements from the Internationals of the early C19th through to the current Global Unions and International Confederation of Trade Unions (ICTU). The thesis examines how nationalism and particular interests have undermined solidarity and reviews the major implications for current efforts to establish and advance a global labour position.
Key agents discussed are the more established agencies of the ICTU and International Labour Organization and the provisional groupings built around social movement unionism and the World Social Forum.

This course provides students with an understanding of the concept of political ideology and introduces them to the influential political ideologies of the 20th and early 21st century and their seminal texts. It encourages students to develop an understanding of their own ideological positioning, to engage in constructive political debate, and to understand the ideological positioning of political actors in their locality or their area of interest.

This article traces the current state of dominant theories or international relations (IR), particularly structural realism, liberal theories of preference, and rational choice theory to six foundation assumptions regarding human nature located in the canonical liberal texts from which neoclassical economics also proceeds. These assumptions are deductively and empirically critiques and their limitations for social theorizing are explicated. An alternative view of 'the human condition' more fruitful for constructivist theorizing in IR is generated with recourse to the Aristotelian analysis of Hannah Arendt.

Grand Mediation (GM) is a new conflict management mechanism initiated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to cope with rapidly growing social conflicts and maintain social stability. This article examines how GM operates in an urban grassroots environment and discusses its advantages for managing social conflicts as reflected in a cases study: the Li Qin mediation office. It concludes that GM may improve the capacity of the local government to engage in conflict resolutions, which confers greater resilience on the authoritarian regime. However, this mechanism is sensitive to changing socio–economic conditions, and its sustainability requires further examination.

By examining the origins of Macao’s 2014-Anti-Retirement Protest, this paper intends to answer whether Macao encounters governance crisis just like Hong Kong. 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 with regard to the level of social mobilization and governmental coercive capacity between the two cities.

根據經典現代化理論，經濟增長將促進民主轉型的發生。然而澳門並沒有在回歸後的高速經濟增長下，出現民主轉型。本文希望從比較政治的角度去解釋澳門為何仍維持一個穩定的威權政體。利用德國政治學家Johannes Gerschewski所提出的合法化(legitimation)、精英吸納(co-optation)和強制能力(repression)三個條件的政體穏定理論框架。以及澳門和新加坡、澳門和香港兩組比較案例分析。本文認為港澳在回歸後政體穩定上的差異，正是因為澳門和新加坡一樣滿足了上述三個實現政體穩定的必要條件，而香港亦沒有。

According to the classic modernization theory, democratization will follow economic development. The above predication, however, does not take place in the case of Macao. This paper intends to examine Macao’s regime stability in a comparative perspective. Through applied the theoretical framework from Johannes Gerschewski which constructed by three conditions: legitimation, co-optation and repression, and two sets of comparative case studies between Singapore, Macao and Hong Kong, this paper argues the difference in regime stability between Macao and Hong Kong after return to China due to the former achieves all the conditions mentioned above like Singapore; while the latter fails.

How do disputants in China solve conflicts involving state actors in their daily life? We analyze the above questions using a representative national dataset and argue that it depends on either ‘Know Who’ or ‘Know How’. We further categorized three potential strategies in solving administrative dispute: Rule-bending, Rule-bound, and Rule-breaking. We find that while elites tend to approach the legal and bureaucratic system, encouraged by political connections, non-elites have to appeal outside the official justice system through petition. The findings herein suggest that China is pursuing regime stability through elite co-optation, which is in line with the theory of political survival.