Macau Business. By João M. Rato. 13 September 2026
Mr Rato is a Member of the Portuguese Diaspora Council and long time resident of Macau
Let’s say that Macau’s younger, yet stronger brother, called Hong Kong, is the regional financial powerhouse and an international super-connector. Our even younger cousin, Shenzhen, is a world-class innovation center, the transformation hub. And the other cousin, the older one, Guangzhou, is the hyper factory and global commercial hub.
How does Macau fit in, and look good, in this family photo?
Once a meaningful trade port of Asia, Macau connected the South China Sea with India and Europe, serving as a gateway to the mainland in an era when access by foreigners was difficult. Goods moved, but so did ideas — science carried into China by sailors, scholars and priests, Matteo Ricci and Tomás Pereira being the best-known cases.
Those centuries of accumulated cultural symbiosis are undisputedly one of the most prominent traits of this unique city. I believe the realm of intercultural relationships is strategic to Macau, and that its historical continuum must be preserved and enhanced. Culture is an asset the city can leverage, in both its physical and its intangible heritage.
As a first-class tourist destination driven by the gambling industry, which, like it or not, is the city’s bread and butter, Macau tends to privilege entertainment rather than operate at the intersection between leisure and knowledge creation. Ephemeral events are mostly superficial, and do not have a lasting effect, nor the synergies and externalities that can really upscale the city’s profile.
In the context of Macau’s economic diversification and the recent unveiling of the Third Five-Year Plan, three of the four major projects lined up for Macau could help position the city more firmly in the realm of knowledge creation, aggregation and dissemination: the Macau–Hengqin International Education (University) Town, the Macau Science and Technology Research and Development Industrial Park, and the Macau International Integrated Tourism and Culture Zone. Their focus on education, science and culture is a move in the right direction, and great news for Macau. For these three projects to succeed and leave an indelible mark, they need three characteristics: scale, openness and an international dimension.
The Macau International Integrated Tourism and Culture Zone will consist of three anchor facilities: the International Museum of Contemporary Art, the Macau International Performing Arts Centre, and the Macau National Museum of Culture, which will become the city’s largest museum.
Two of the three are named International. The flagship is named National.
The first two facilities matter enormously for Macau’s cultural life. But it is unlikely they will reach Hong Kong’s level as the regional reference in contemporary and performing arts. M+ has already taken contemporary and visual culture. The Lyric Theatre Complex adds a 1,450-seat stage to West Kowloon. And the Hong Kong Arts Festival has spent five decades assembling an unmatched level of trust and reach: this year alone, five weeks, more than a thousand artists, a history running from the Vienna Philharmonic to the Bolshoi.
Which brings me to the question: what is distinctive in Macau’s future flagship museum that might propel it to become a reference?
Despite the infinite richness of Chinese culture, such a museum could become, in effect, another regional telling of Chinese national heritage — arriving late to territory Hong Kong has also claimed, with a head start. The Hong Kong Palace Museum, built through a direct cooperation agreement with the Palace Museum in Beijing, has taken prestige Chinese imperial heritage.
Fortunately, Macau has a credible story of its own. Macau was the first and longest continuous point of sustained contact between China and Europe. The Historic Centre of Macau is already a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The claim is real and organic. The city has simply never built the institution to match it.
The Global Civilization Initiative, launched in 2023, fits that story closely. It is China’s own framework for civilizational exchange, built around respect for diversity, mutual learning, dialogue and equality between traditions. A museum built on genuine co-curatorship — two institutions, two traditions, one shared account — would embody that framework.
The transformational potential of a world-class museum in a small city is not negligible. Bilbao is a good example: a declining industrial port with no tourism to speak of, which became a permanent fixture on the global cultural circuit through one building with curatorial substance behind it.
Macau is not the tallest figure in this frame, nor the loudest, and does not need to be. It is the uncle who speaks both languages without effort, because he grew up hearing them at the same table. Who learned early that people of different origins and beliefs can live in one small place, trade with each other, marry into each other’s families, and build something prosperous that neither would have built alone. That knowledge is rare.
I can picture that dialogue taking place in Macau — a museum where a piece of Ming porcelain sits beside the Lisbon inventory that recorded its sale, hosting researchers from different fields and different backgrounds, reaching an audience far wider than the region.
The real issue is not which partner, but at what level of ambition. Once the scope is international, the question of who sits at the table follows naturally, and the possibilities are not infinite. Portugal is a small country. Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and the wider Lusophone world hold institutions with real depth in this shared history. But if the aim is a partner whose founding logic already matches the museum being described, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation is difficult to look past. Its collection is itself an intercultural object — Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Islamic, Armenian and Far Eastern work assembled alongside European painting by a man who collected across civilizations rather than within one. It has decades of sustained work across the Portuguese-speaking countries. And its international presence runs through Lisbon, Paris and London, the cities where its founder lived. It has never established itself in Asia. Macau would be the point where a Lusophone network meets China — which is what the city has been for four and a half centuries anyway.
Which returns us to the family photograph. Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou earned their places through decades of hard, deliberate work, and each is formidable at what it does. Macau will not out-finance, out-innovate or out-manufacture any of them. Its contribution to the picture is of a different kind.
Every photograph needs depth of field. Bring only the foreground into focus and the image flattens; the eye has nowhere to travel. Macau is not the tallest figure in this frame, nor the loudest, and does not need to be. It is the uncle who speaks both languages without effort, because he grew up hearing them at the same table. Who learned early that people of different origins and beliefs can live in one small place, trade with each other, marry into each other’s families, and build something prosperous that neither would have built alone. That knowledge is rare. It took centuries to acquire, and no one else in this family has it.
That is not a lesser place in the photograph. It is the one that gives the picture its depth.
