Business opportunities, investments, learning Mandarin, and the possible twinning of the Azores with one of China’s richest regions are the results, at least in public terms, of a high-level visit to the Azores by Chinese diplomats and businesspeople. The Azores involved the vice president of its regional government in the visit, which means that the region is taking the Chinese interest seriously.
Portugal’s GDP is linked to Chinese interests by around four percent. Still, the Azores have been excluded from doing business with China due to geopolitical and geostrategic considerations that intersect on these sides of the Atlantic. We’re cut off from these and other companies – and because we’re blocked in many areas, the misery that characterizes us has found yet another ally, historically, on the side of evil. And we’ve never really understood why we should be cut off from relations with certain nation-states just because interests that are alien to us determine our lives. Not once are we compensated for countless missed opportunities.
We now see how allies we took for granted can become very serious problems, to the point where our President of the Republic is forced to talk about allies or former allies. We have sacrificed a lot in the name of such allies and on the altar of allegedly superior national (Portuguese) interests. We believed we contributed to a greater good: a relationship between peoples based on institutions, minimum rights, and shared ideals. These ideals have fallen into the hands of an unbridled market of interests that strongly disgust us. And in no time, we find ourselves in the bush without a dog.
We’ve been doing this for two centuries—first at the behest of British interests and, since World War II, at the behest of American interests, all tempered with the always superior interests of Lisbon. With all this, development has been waiting to the point where we are perhaps in a negative social endemism with no way out, at least in sight.
Perhaps the time has come for us to put our interests on the table. We will know how to choose our partners according to our own standards, which will certainly not fail to make our ancestors proud, to serve all those involved in the present, and to prepare a future without the limitations of the days we live in.

Editorial of the newspaper Diário Insular

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from various leading thinkers, writers, and editorial boards from the Azores to give the diaspora and those interested in the current Azores a sense of the significant opinions on some of the archipelago’s issues.

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL).