A few kilometers from the casino lights that advertise the new wealth of Macau's gambling-fueled economy stands a grimy row of overcrowded apartments, the Rua Um do Bairro Va Tai.
In the days of Portugal's colonial rule, this street and the surrounding neighborhood in the north of Macau, a short stroll from the border gate with mainland China, became home to some of the city's poorest residents.
Despite years of spectacular economic growth, locals say the area is little changed, left on the margins of the casino boom.
Kuan Keng Nam, whose father runs a small home-repair business here, recently landed a job as a cook in a Portuguese restaurant in the food court of the Venetian, the newest and biggest of the casinos.
But Kuan, 23, found that a casino job was not a ticket out of a place where many of the people he knows are unemployed or underemployed. Each month Kuan earns 7,000 patacas, as the Macanese currency is called, or US$876 -- a respectable income by local standards -- but it does not go very far.
INFLUX OF LABOR
Like many other Macanese, he complains that the influx of labor from China keeps wages low, while the cost of living, especially rents in working-class neighborhoods, spirals upward.
"Mainland people might be earning 3,000 a month at home. They come here and they earn 6,000," Kuan said. "For them it's a high rate; for us it's too low."
This is the reverse side of Macau's phenomenal growth, out of sight of most visitors to the artificial world created by new casinos like the Venetian, where, above the gondolas on the fake canal, the sky is always blue because it is painted on the ceiling.
"The government tells us the casino boom is bringing wealth to Macau," said Jose Pereira Coutinho, a deputy in Macau's Legislative Assembly. "That is not true, because this wealth is only for a few. It is not helping people who are suffering."
In what has traditionally been a placid political environment, signs of public discontent are emerging. Several thousand people protested on Oct. 1, China's national day, for the first time. They marched over a potpourri of grievances ranging from harsh new penalties for illegal parking to corruption in government and the use of illegal labor. It followed a rowdy protest in May on similar issues. Another protest is expected in December to coincide with the anniversary of the handover to China in 1999.
Macau's small democratic movement is also riding the wave of discontent to step up its campaign for direct elections of the chief executive and the Legislative Assembly. Current laws provide for popular election of only 12 of the 29 legislators. The chief executive is appointed by an electoral college of influential citizens, most of whom are seen as conservative allies of Beijing.
There is a common theme to recent anti-government sentiment, legislators and political analysts say: Living standards for the poor and middle class are being eroded, and the government of Chief Executive Edmund Ho (何
An annual report from the European Commission on conditions in Macau said in August that the gambling boom had resulted in "steep and widening inequality of incomes."
With imported workers -- principally from mainland China but also from Southeast Asia -- numbering about 70,000, or a quarter of the workforce, the labor market has become more competitive and wages have not kept up with prices. Property and rents are estimated to have risen by 200 percent to 300 percent.
RSS