Five years after being returned to China on Dec. 20, 1999, the once-sleepy former Portuguese colony of Macau has awoken to transform itself into Asia's very own Las Vegas.
Behind a counter cluttered with exotic cocktails, scantily dressed girls sway their hips to the latest hit which is quickly taken up by a rapper who looks like he has come from Harlem. Under bright lights and a giant screen flashing images of a perfect world, thousands of gaming tables and machines crowd fashionable restaurants.
PHOTO: AFP
The era of smoky, dim dens that gave Macau its reputation as a gambling hell has long passed. Today the scene has an American flavor, such as at the Sands casino, that is straight out of Las Vegas.
"Macau has become Las Vegas. I have been down there and that is where I realized that this is what China wants to do with Macau," said Jose Rocha Dinis, editor of the Portuguese-language daily Jornal Tribuna Macau.
Dinis doesn't recognize "his" Macau, where he arrived 23 years ago.
"It was a small, very quiet town. Everything has changed in five years and especially in the past three years," he said.
The turning point was not Macau's return to China in 1999 but the end of a monopoly on gambling in 2001, Dinis said.
The handover ended 452 years of Portuguese presence in the last colony in Asia. The transfer was smooth, unlike that of Hong Kong across the Pearl River two years earlier, because "Macau was already Chinese," he said.
"The Portuguese only had the power to name the governor, the diplomacy and the security forces. Everything else was already done in Macau by the local government," Dinis said.
The real revolution only came in 2001. That year Macau's most prominent Chinese resident Stanley Ho lost the privilege of being the territory's one and only gambling baron -- a luxury he had had since 1962 because of a concession from the government. Today Ho's Oriental Palace casino, with its outdated Chinese kitsch, and the gaudy gold-covered Lisboa, look like dinosaurs in the new Macau.
"A new era has begun in 2001," said Glenn McCartney, a gambling expert at the Institute for Tourism Studies, unfolding a map of a Macau to come.
"By 2009, 60,000 hotel rooms and 20 casinos will be opened," he said. The newcomers will include a replica of Las Vegas' famous Venetian casino and hotel, complete with canals and gondolas, he said.
The investments are estimated to be worth more than 25 billion patacas (US$3.2 billion).
In 1999 the returns from gambling amounted to US$1.7 billion. This rose to US$3.6 billion dollars last year, putting Macau third in the world behind Las Vegas and Atlantic City, both in the US, McCartney said.
It should overtake Las Vegas next year, experts say.
Casinos already represent "more than 40 percent of the gross national product and more than 80 percent of the income" of the territory, said Albano Martins, the main economist in Macau.
"At the end of 2004, the taxes paid by the casinos will match the whole budget of the state [Macau], that is 15 billion patacas," he said.
While the city fought recession in 1999, its growth has since become one of the highest in the world: 46.7 percent in the second trimester of this year.
"The key is the flood of the Chinese," said Martins. Macau is one of a limited number of territories or countries which Chinese tourists are able to visit as individual travelers and not on organized tours.
The number of Chinese tourists has tripled in the past four years from 2.9 million in 2000 to nearly eight million in the 10 first months of this year.
And they spend 2,820 patacas a day, according to figures for the second trimester of this year, compared to less than 900 for visitors from Hong Kong and 300 for Europeans.
"You will not find anyone here who will tell you that it was better before [the handover]," said Paulo Azevedo, editor in chief of the Portuguese-language daily Ponto Final.
But will the Macau miracle last?
"Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Japan also want their own casinos. It's only a matter of time," McCartney said.
DAMAGE REPORT: Global central banks are assessing war-driven inflation risks as the law of unintended consequences careens around the world, spiking oil prices Central banks from Washington to London and from Jakarta to Taipei are about to make their first assessments of economic damage after more than two weeks of conflict between the US and Iran. Decisions this week encompassing every member of the G7 and eight of the world’s 10 most-traded currency jurisdictions are likely to confirm to investors that the specter of a new inflation shock is already worrying enough to prompt heightened caution. The US Federal Reserve is widely expected to do exactly what everyone anticipated weeks ahead of its March 17-18 policy gathering: hold rates steady. The narrative surrounding that
At a massive shipyard in North Vancouver, Canadian workers grind metal beams for a powerful new icebreaker crucial to cementing the country’s presence in the increasingly contested arctic. Icebreakers are specialized, expensive vessels able to navigate in the frozen far north. And “this is the crown jewel,” said Eddie Schehr, vice president of production at the Seaspan shipyard. For Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who heads to Norway next Friday to observe arctic defense drills involving troops from 14 NATO states, Canada’s extreme north has emerged as a strategic priority. “Canada is and forever will be an Arctic nation,” he said ahead of
Chinese entrepreneur Frank Gao used to spend long hours running his social media accounts but now outsources the chore to artificial intelligence (AI) agent tool OpenClaw, which is taking China by storm despite official warnings over cybersecurity. OpenClaw, created in November by an Austrian coder, differs from bots such as ChatGPT because it can execute real-life tasks such as sending e-mails, organizing files or even booking flight tickets. “Since January, I’ve spent hours on the lobster every day,” Gao said in an interview, referring to OpenClaw’s red crustacean mascot. “We’re family.” After downloading OpenClaw, users connect it to artificial intelligence models of their
PRICE HIKES: The war in the Middle East would not significantly disrupt supply in the short term, but semiconductor companies are facing price surges for materials Taiwan’s semiconductor companies are not facing imminent supply disruptions of essential chemicals or raw materials due to the war in the Middle East, but surges in material costs loom large, industry association SEMI Taiwan said yesterday. The association’s comments came amid growing concerns that supplies of helium and other key raw materials used in semiconductor production could become a choke point after Qatar shut down its liquefied natural gas (LNG) production and helium output earlier this month due to the conflict. Qatar is the second-largest LNG supplier in the world and accounts for about 33 percent of global helium output. Helium is
RSS