Economist Echo Chan Keng Hong was appointed, to represent the Macau Government, as the Deputy Secretary-General to the Permanent Secretariat of Forum Macau, according to an official statement issued by the Government Information Bureau.

Echo Chan’s appointment to the post was published on 6 January in a statement from the office of the Secretary for Economy and Finance of the Macau government.

Echo Chan was Deputy Secretary-General of the Permanent Secretariat of Forum Macau between March and October 2015, when she left the post for personal reasons.

The economist, who was advisor to the Secretary for the Economy and Finance, Leong Vai Tac, replaces Cristina Morais, who was Deputy Secretary-General of Forum Macau between October 2015 and October 2016.

Echo Chan, who speaks Mandarin, Cantonese and Portuguese, graduated in Economics from the University of Jinan, Guangzhou, has a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Macau and studied Portuguese at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.

Much of her career has been at the Macau Trade and Investment Promotion Institute (IPIM), where she was executive member of the Board of Directors, but also worked as deputy coordinator of the Office for Preparation of the Chinese Traditional medicine Science and Industrial Park in Hengqin in Zhuhai municipality and during her previous stint at the Macau Forum, was coordinator of the Support Office to the Permanent Secretariat of the institution.

The Permanent Secretariat of Forum Macau is headed by Secretary General Xu Yingzhen, appointed in August 2016 by the Chinese Trade Ministry and has two deputy secretaries-general.

One of the Deputy Secretaries-General is appointed by Macau, which is now Echo Chan, and another appointed by the Portuguese-speaking countries that are part of Forum Macau, which in this case is Mozambican diplomat Vicente de Jesus Manuel.

The Macau Forum, created in October 2003, is an official initiative of China, through the Ministry of Commerce, based in Macau, which aims to strengthen cooperation and economic exchanges between China and the Portuguese-speaking countries with Macau as a privileged platform.

Forum Macau includes Angola, Brazil, Cabo Verde (Cape Verde), Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and Timor-Leste (East Timor) and following the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Sao Tome and Principe it is expected that this country will also join the group of Portuguese-speaking countries of Forum Macau. (macauhub)