Insulting or indispensable? PLA presence in Macau for Typhoon Hato clean-up welcomed by most, but not all
Lawmaker says local government should be ashamed of overly dramatic move, but many residents are just happy for the help
Chinese Army helping Macau relief operations in wake of Typhoon Hato is ‘warning for Hong Kong’
Some residents, however, have branded the sight as an embarrassment to the local government.
“It’s a shame for Macau to have PLA soldiers cleaning the streets. The fact that they needed to ask for help from [mainland] China showed that the local government had no capacity to handle the situation,” resident Catarina Terra said.
And pro-democracy Macau legislator Au Kam-san said he believed it was unnecessary to call on the garrison just to help clean up the streets, likening the move to “slaughtering a chicken with a meat cleaver”.
“Should an army be used this way? Soldiers may have a lot of experience in disaster zone response but less so in picking up trash and sawing trees, at least not a lot more than the [government’s] own frontline workers,” he wrote in a Facebook post.