There is certainly plenty of room for catch-up growth. When the school was founded in 1998, a year before Portugal handed Macau back to China, it had nearly twice as many students (and there were at least three other such schools through much of the 1990s). The vast majority of pupils were children of Portuguese expatriates, who then dominated the senior ranks of Macau’s public sector. Today the school’s fastest-growing ethnic group is Chinese.
Only 2.3% of the city’s 660,000 people claim fluency in Portuguese (about 1.8% of them are wholly or partly ethnic Portuguese). But the language is still in official use, along with Chinese, of which the local spoken form is Cantonese. In recent years interest in Portuguese has surged. The number of students taking courses in it at Instituto Português do Oriente, a Macau-based cultural centre backed by the Portuguese government, was around 5,000 last year, more than double the figure in 2012. Many are officials who want to “reach the top” of Macau’s government, says Joaquim Ramos, the centre’s director. In its economic plan for 2016-20, Macau’s government pledged to “give priority to guaranteeing employment” for “talented people who are bilingual in Chinese and Portuguese”. It promised to boost subsidies for those studying Portuguese at university.
At present most civil servants can speak good English, but few have even passable Portuguese. That is partly because Portuguese was never a compulsory subject in most schools. So why the growth of interest in it? The answer lies in China’s burgeoning trade with the Lusophone world, about three-quarters of which is with Brazil. In 2003 the central government founded an organisation called Forum Macau to boost such commerce. Every three or four years government ministers from member countries gather in the eponymous city, which like nearby Hong Kong—a former British colony—is now a “special administrative region” of China. Last year China traded goods worth $118bn with the forum’s foreign participants (eight of them, since the African state of São Tomé and Príncipe joined in 2017, having severed its ties with Taiwan). This amount was still relatively small—only 3% of China’s total trade in goods. But it was nearly 30% higher than in the previous year.
A young native of Macau who prefers to be identified by his surname, Ho, says he wants to be an interpreter for a Chinese company with interests in Portugal or Lusophone Africa, such as Mozambique or Angola. Perhaps anticipating the needs of people like him, the University of Macau recently opened, to much fanfare, a “bilingual teaching and training centre”. It offers Portuguese-language workshops tailored for professionals.
For Mr Ho, the decision to take up Portuguese is also a personal matter. The language is “part of Macau’s identity”, he notes. Since around 2011 residents have rated their identity as citizens of Macau as being stronger than their Chinese identity, according to annual surveys by the University of Hong Kong (the year 2015 was an exception). Native-born youngsters, who have no memory of Portuguese rule, are especially proud of Macau’s Portuguese heritage, Mr Ho says. A similar kind of “localism”, as it is often described, is also on the rise in Hong Kong. There, however, it is intermingled with demands for greater democracy or even outright secession from China. Happily for the government in Beijing, the people of Macau show little interest in pushing the case for either.