In this very well-written book, Cathryn H. Clayton sets out to study Macau, a former Portuguese enclave at the southern part of China neighboring Hong Kong, from the unique perspective of “sort-of sovereignty.” She discusses how this shapes the ways Macau people think of, or imagine, themselves as Chinese, “sort-of Chinese”, or “Chinese but different.” She argues that the Portuguese governed Macau not by enforcing supreme coercive power—the usual exercise of sovereignty. Instead, Portugal acknowledged itself as never having full sovereignty over Macau during its 450 years of colonial rule. It practiced “a shared sovereignty” (p. 14), illuminated in the idea of “lusotropicalism,” which held that “Portuguese expansion was an enterprise of racial and cultural mixing that was fundamentally more humane and progressive than its northern European counterparts” (p. 52). As such, in the last years before returning Macau to China, the Portuguese government tried to convince its colonial subjects (95 percent of whom identified as Chinese) that they possessed a “unique cultural identity”: that although they were Chinese they were also “different from all other Chinese people” (p. 2).

Clayton explores the complexity of sovereignty and Chineseness through an analysis of events and controversies that are related to the sense of community and commonality, and she allows her subjects to discuss, usually in subtle ways, when, why, and in what forms they felt themselves to be Chinese or sort-of Chinese. To her subjects, the visible state of lawlessness and violence in the late 1990s was representative not of an alternative sovereignty but of an outright refusal by the Macau government to fulfill the requirements of “real” sovereignty. Their desire to be returned to the Chinese motherland had nothing to do with Chineseness but grew from an urge “to be governed by a rational, responsive, and responsible state” (p. 80). Meanwhile, the “Resolution on Nationality” allowing (or in fact requiring) the true natives of Macau, the Macanese, who were “sort-of Chinese, but different” (p. 22), to choose either Portuguese or Chinese nationality, worked to negate the very hybrid subjectivity that the pre-handover Macau government had so fervently tried to promote. It also revealed the limits of Chineseness – by granting the Macanese the potential to choose because of their mixed blood, it essentially set them apart from the “real” Chinese who had no such choice. The lack of a unified educational policy and in particular the lack of a local history curriculum further exemplified the colonial neglect of the process of nation-building (or in Macau, “local-building” [p. 140]). It also made the attempt to define a “local” that could accurately reflect the sort-of sovereignty and sort-of Chinese status all the more urgent and delicate in the transitional politics. The disjuncture between the Portuguese street names and the vernacular street names used by the Chinese population suggests again “the irrelevance of Portuguese sovereignty to the lives of the majority of Macau residents” (p. 194). The heritage movement to preserve Portuguese Macau's uniqueness such that it would not become “just like any other Chinese city” (p. 199) was also criticized by some residents as “building ruins” (p. 209). Finally, the establishment of the Macau Museum brought to the fore the question, “what kind of object the past is imagined as” (p. 226). While it attempted to popularize a narrative of shared sovereignty as the basis of Macau's uniqueness, the “reality effect” (p. 254–260) worked only to bring back disparate memories of the past in many Macau residents.

Clayton is correct that there are no sure answers to the question of what makes Chinese people Chinese. Instead, the task is to tackle how categories of experience help constitute Chineseness, or make the very idea of Chineseness, as a form of collective subjectivity, meaningful at particular times and places. The sort-of sovereignty or sort-of Chinese Clayton describes here does not grow out of a mere hybridity of a “four century-old meeting-point between East and West” (p. 3). Rather, it speaks to levels of ambivalence and complexity that are sometimes difficult to define, as indicated in a metaphor used by one of her informants: “Macanese culture was like a certain Macanese delicacy… ‘sort of like wonton, but different’” (p. 22). I am, however, not as optimistic as Clayton in seeing Macau as representing a more flexible type of sovereignty. Instead, I see this sort-of sovereignty as an example of the utter failure of Portuguese colonialism in Macau. Clayton is in fact right in her observation that “although it may be possible to imagine alternative forms of sovereignty, it may not always be desirable” (p. 98). The failure of this sort-of sovereignty in Portuguese Macau perhaps highlights the importance of the conception of modern sovereign power.