Why Asian Gaming Hub Macao Is Getting Tougher on its Big Casinos

SAN FRANCISCO — 

For many serious patrons of casinos, Chinese-ruled Macao has been the mecca of gaming, with high-end shopping and even higher-stakes tables. One of the world’s biggest gambling centers before the COVID-19 closures, Macao is now experiencing tougher scrutiny on its casino scene as part of what analysts describe as an effort to control crime and capital outflows that rippled into the mainland China economy.

A draft gaming bill now pending in the Macao Legislative Assembly would stop casino operators from issuing junket licenses, which are for larger organized tours, and from sharing revenue with any gambler-to-casino intermediaries. It would limit the number of newly licensed casinos to six, with terms of 10 years, half the current time, while specifying maximum numbers of gaming tables and gaming machines.

Efforts to redo gaming in the former Portuguese colony that has long thrived on casino income fall in line with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ideals for a less corrupt, more controlled China, some analysts believe.

Mainland Chinese tourists, the top source of casino revenue, had taken so much cash to the offshore territory by 2013 that China began tightening rules to curb money laundering. The Chinese Communist Party increasingly resented outflows of mainland Chinese money into Macao bank accounts and has tried for years to slow that process, said Dexter Roberts, U.S.-based author of The Myth of Chinese Capitalism.

“I think that in many ways, in the eyes of Xi Jinping, Macao is ugly and objectionable,” Roberts said. “I think he would sort of plug his nose and put up with it, knowing that the last thing they want to do is destroy the economy of Macao, but I think that Xi Jinping actually has an attitude where he looks down on excessive wealth (and) looks down on vice to a degree.”

Controlled return of tourism

The COVID-19 pandemic has sealed Macao’s borders, even to nearby Hong Kong, since early 2020, handing casinos a “devastating shock,” said Rajiv Biswas, Asia-Pacific chief economist with IHS Markit in Singapore.

Mainland Chinese tourists began coming back in August 2020 as COVID-19 was brought under control, a tourism office spokesperson said. They’re allowed to visit today in limited numbers.

“With the COVID-19 pandemic situation relatively stable in Macao and mainland China, tourism flows have started to resume between the two places in a phased manner since mid-August 2020, placing the city’s tourism on track for a gradual recovery,” the spokesperson said.

Arrivals totaling 7.7 million in 2021 were up 30% over 2020 but were 80% below pre-pandemic levels, according to Macao Government Tourism Office data. About 91% of the visitors came from mainland China, up 48% from the previous year, the data show.

Macao, like Hong Kong, is a special administrative region of China with its own currency and immigration controls.

Straitjacketed gaming

Macao, pre-COVID, served mostly groups of mainland Chinese or Hong Kong day-trippers. In the open-to-all casino areas, the visitors would play baccarat and poker alongside handfuls of tourists from other parts of the world, usually elsewhere in Asia.

Different from their counterparts in the U.S. gambling hub of Las Vegas, the giant casinos of Macao eschew cheap meals and children’s playrooms and instead feature swank shopping malls with name-brand clothing, jewelry and watches.

Among the clientele are junket gamblers. Junkets are formed when outside operators paid a commission by the casinos contact wealthy gamblers with offers of luxury travel. Some junket intermediaries lend money to players and collect debts.

In a sign of China’s aim to stop the practice, Macao police arrested junket organizer Alvin Chau in November on suspicion of criminal association, illegal gambling exploitation and money laundering.

High-end shopping for tourists is likely to loom larger over time. Macao could eventually morph into a venue expressly for wealthy Chinese who shop lavishly, said Stuart Orr, School of Business head at Melbourne Institute of Technology.

Chinese officials will feel pressured to reopen again in pre-COVID fashion, he said.

“I think that’s a challenge,” Orr said. “The economic consequences of staying closed are that the economy starts to wind down, and I think a lot of countries are facing that.”

Casinos that stay in the game will find that the draft bill removes “the considerable uncertainty” about how far new regulations will eventually go in Macao, said Rajiv Biswas, chief Asia Pacific economist with market research firm IHS Markit.

“As these [COVID-19] restrictions are gradually eased, this should allow a strong rebound for the Macao gaming industry over the medium term,” Biswas said. “Nevertheless, Macao’s gaming industry will need to adapt to operating in an environment of greater regulatory scrutiny.”

Wynn Macau, one of the largest casinos in the territory, did not answer questions for this report about its future operations.

China’s economic crackdowns are hardly limited to Macau. Regulators have tightened grips in the past year over private education, internet technology and listings of Chinese companies on offshore stock exchanges.

China last year paired Macao with neighboring Guangdong province of China in a special economic zone with special tax and other policies aimed at diversifying Macao’s economy away from gambling into finance, high-tech, traditional Chinese medicine, tourism, exhibition and trade.

But Chinese domestic arrivals remain a priority for now, the tourism office says. “While at this stage, due to the travel restrictions in place, the focus remains on attracting visitors from mainland China, with a synergy of online-offline promotions and events in the city, this office has similar plans on hold to be launched in other destinations in the region and internationally, once safe travel links with Macao resume,” the spokesperson said.

Chinese officials realize that gambling and tourism run Macao’s economy, Roberts said, so they will avoid any crackdown so strong that it hurts those core businesses.

Asian Americans Ask How to End the Hate

Los Angeles — 

Another surge in hate crimes and incidents aimed at Asian Americans, ranging from verbal harassment to violent assaults, has that community searching for ways to stop it.

Among the victims, Michelle Go, 40, was pushed onto the tracks of the New York subway January 15 in an unprovoked deadly attack. A senior manager at a financial consultancy, Go was a Chinese American who had volunteered to help the homeless.

Authorities said her assailant, an African American homeless man, had a history of psychiatric illness. The lethal attack drew international attention.

While many assaults have been captured on video, others go unnoticed. A Chinese immigrant named Michelle, who asked that her full name not be used, was also the target of an unprovoked attack in an upscale neighborhood in Long Beach, California. The event was not recorded and received no news coverage, but it left an indelible mark on Michelle.

On May 2, 2021, “a beautiful morning,” Michelle recalls, she went for her daily walk. A small woman in her early 50s, she passed a Sunday farmers market, busy restaurants and yachts moored in the harbor. She doesn’t remember what happened next, but a bystander who helped her has a clear recollection.

Max Wilson, a student and athlete at San Diego State University, was walking near the water with his father.

“A small Asian woman was just minding her business, walking past a man,” Wilson, 20, recalls. “All of a sudden, we saw him turn around, and he starts punching the back of this poor Asian woman’s head and repeatedly bashing it.” Wilson says he and his father “couldn’t believe their eyes.”

On regaining consciousness, Michelle found herself, bleeding and in shock, on the ground, being helped by bystanders. She later learned she had suffered a concussion — along with injuries to her shoulder, teeth and mouth — and had bruises and cuts from head to ankle.

Wilson followed the man, who grabbed a heavy wooden board from a dumpster and swung it repeatedly, attacking the young man and smashing it against a car, but Wilson overpowered him.

Passers-by found ice for Michelle’s injuries and called an ambulance. Police arrived quickly. Wilson pointed to the man’s hiding place under a dock, and he was arrested.

“There was absolutely no reason for him to target this tiny woman,” Wilson recalls.

Michelle has mostly recovered but is “afraid of going out (and is) extremely vigilant,” she said. She suffers from nightmares, headaches and chronic shoulder pain.

Police and prosecutors have charged the man with assault.

“I have to think it was racially motivated,” Michelle says. She did not know her attacker, she had done nothing to offend him, and non-Asians on the scene were unmolested, she says. Robbery wasn’t a motive because he took none of her belongings.

Attacks such as Michelle’s are on the rise, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics. In 2020, hate crimes against Asian Americans were up, with 279 recorded incidents versus 158 the previous year.

Not the full story

The FBI-compiled numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Manjusha Kulkarni of the organization Stop AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) Hate notes that “not all law enforcement entities collect the data. They don’t all report it to the FBI.”

FILE – A woman holds a sign and attends a rally to support stop AAPI (Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) hate at the Logan Square Monument in Chicago, March 20, 2021.

Kulkarni says language barriers keep some immigrants from reporting crimes. Others, without legal status to stay in the country, fear immigration authorities.

Kulkarni, whose organization tracks self-reported hate incidents, says that “90% of what is reported to us are not crimes.” Instead, they are “comments made in the workplace, at school. It can be bullying. It can be harassment,” she says, “and it can be discrimination in retail.”

From March 2020 through September 2021, her organization tracked more than 10,000 self-reported incidents and collaborated on a survey that found 1 in 5 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders had experienced hate incidents in the past year. Whatever their background, “from Vietnamese, Filipinos, even South Asians and Pacific Islanders,” they are often targets of anti-Chinese bias, Kulkarni said.

That happened to Thai American Tanny Jiraprapasuke, who was verbally attacked aboard a Los Angeles metro train in February 2020. The young woman was subjected to a tirade against Chinese immigrants by a man who berated China as the source of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

It was “almost like a performance,” she recalls, with “big gestures. He was standing up, he was yelling.” It soon became clear the rant was directed at her. After 15 minutes, the man eventually disembarked, but the episode has left her shaken.

Prosecution of hate crimes

Authorities can sometimes stiffen penalties by charging perpetrators with hate crimes under federal or state laws. This happened to six men in San Jose, California, in December. Prosecutors said the men had worked together in more than 170 incidents in the San Francisco region, targeting Asians for robbery, burglary or theft.

Yet even when police file assault charges in violent attacks, as in the Long Beach case, prosecutors are reluctant to file hate crime enhancements because the bar is so high, says May Lee, host of the The May Lee Show podcast and an adjunct professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Federal authorities define a hate crime as a crime against a person or property motivated by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity. Yet hate itself is not a crime, notes the FBI website, which says free speech needs to be protected.

Successful hate crime prosecution requires both a crime and a provable motive, and “a lot of DAs (district attorneys) don’t want to even try … because they don’t want to lose,” Lee said.

Culture plays a role in obscuring the extent of the problem, say Asian American analysts. Victims often don’t want to make waves, so they keep quiet. Yet videos of hate incidents keep surfacing “almost every single day,” Lee said.

One of the brutal attacks captured on video showed an 84-year-old Chinese American man being pushed to the ground in San Francisco; the victim suffered serious injuries. Another showed two older women stabbed at a bus stop, and a third depicted the fatal attack in San Francisco of an elderly Thai immigrant.

FILE – Protesters march at a rally against Asian hate crimes past the Los Angeles Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles, March 27, 2021.

Some people say Asian Americans are viewed as easy targets. Others look elsewhere for motivation, blaming fear of COVID-19. Some accuse former U.S. President Donald Trump of inflaming hatred through his remarks that China was responsible for the coronavirus, which he called the “China virus,” “Wuhan virus” or “Kung Flu.”

Historical roots

Analyst Jessica Lee of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank, sees historical precedents for the hate, saying “anti-Asian violence has really ebbed and flowed.”

At least 17 Chinese immigrants were killed in a racial massacre in Los Angeles’ Chinatown in 1871. Eight men from the mob of 500 white and Hispanic men were convicted of manslaughter, but the convictions were overturned.

Arsonists burned San Jose’s Chinatown to the ground in 1887, and city officials formally apologized only last year.

Asians have also been singled out for restrictive legislation. Chinese were barred from immigration to the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act, initially to limit competition for laboring and mining jobs. The measure passed in 1882 and was extended and in force until 1943.

Beginning the previous year, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans, many of them U.S. citizens, were held in internment camps during World War II.

Later, “during the Cold War,” says Jessica Lee, “the FBI targeted Chinese and Chinese American scientists and students and questioned their loyalty to the United States” amid talk of a “yellow peril.”

Kulkarni of Stop AAPI Hate says that’s happening today with the China Initiative, a Department of Justice program aimed at curbing economic espionage by China. The Trump administration launched it in November 2018, and it is still in place.

The DOJ says the initiative is aimed not at Americans but at China, which it says is connected to 60% of trade secret theft cases.

Jessica Lee of the Quincy Institute says the Biden administration’s continuing tensions with China are inadvertently fostering ethnic divisions.

While others dispute a connection between geopolitics and hate crimes, Jessica Lee says racially tinged rhetoric triggers deep-seated prejudices. She said Asian Americans, regarded as “perpetual foreigners,” are vulnerable.

“No matter how many generations of Asian American family you trace back to,” she says, “you will always be seen as a foreigner because you’re not white.”

Kulkarni adds, “Not only are our communities viewed as bringing disease, but they’re also thought of as sly and cunning.”

Heightening racial tensions

Stop AAPI Hate says most perpetrators of self-reported hate incidents against Asian Americans are white, but African Americans and Hispanics are the perpetrators in a number of violent attacks recorded on video. Analysts say this adds to intergroup tensions, even though Blacks and Hispanics are themselves the targets of hate crimes.

“Sadly, even those who don’t subscribe directly to white supremacy still can fall victim to it in terms of their own thinking,” Kulkarni says.

Michelle, the Long Beach attack victim, says her attacker was African American and so was the young man who saved her.

Wilson, the student athlete, is mixed race, with a white father and Black mother. He has lived in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Beijing, and he and his family speak Mandarin, thanks to his father’s service as a U.S. diplomat in China.

The Wilsons “saved my life,” Michelle says.

The United States is a nation of immigrants, and its 22 million Asian Americans are a diverse group, note researchers at the Pew Research Center.

But one-third of them fear threats and physical attacks, and 80% say violence against Asian Americans is rising.

Searching for solutions

Hate incidents have Asian Americans searching for solutions, individually and through organizations.

Michelle believes Chinese Americans are scapegoats for frustration with the coronavirus and the economic problems it has brought. The hatred is misdirected, she notes, adding, “I’ve been living here for over 20 years. I’m as American as any other American.”

She is encouraged by those who came to her aid and says Americans must “create a positive culture that unites people.”

Tanny Jiraprapasuke says discussion about China and the coronavirus pandemic sparked the insults directed at her and shows “how words really matter.”

The Quincy Institute’s Jessica Lee says politicians must tamp down rhetoric that may unintentionally inflame racial tensions.

May Lee, of USC, credits social media with exposing a wide-ranging problem and creating incentive for change. She believes schools can do a better job of highlighting Asian American contributions to the American story, and notes that Illinois and New Jersey have mandated Asian American history classes in their public schools. It is a history unknown to many Americans, she adds.

Kulkarni says a national commission to discourage hatred could be modeled on local initiatives. In Los Angeles, the Human Relations Commission works to defuse racial tensions, and New York City’s Commission on Human Rights enforces human rights laws. And there are similar programs in other cities.

All say that recognizing the problem of hatred against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders is the first step in addressing it.

VOA’s Elizabeth Lee contributed to this report.

China’s Financial Diplomacy Wins Influence in Central Asian Countries

WASHINGTON — 

This year marks the 30th anniversary of China having established diplomatic ties with five central Asian countries. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan gained independence.

Three decades later, in the first week of January 2022, President Xi Jinping exchanged congratulatory messages with the presidents of the five states.

China’s influence in Central Asia has grown exponentially in recent decades as the five nations seek Chinese financing for everything from infrastructure projects to educational endeavors, according to Samantha Custer, director of policy analysis at AidData, a research lab at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

She told VOA the main goal of Chinese financial diplomacy in the region is to gain “access to energy supplies and strategic positioning for transit routes.”

Custer said the five countries are of interest to Beijing for two main reasons: First, they offer access to ready supplies of energy via oil, natural gas, or hydropower; and secondly, potential Belt and Road initiative trade routes from China to Europe and the Middle East run through them.

“In keeping with this strategy, most of China’s financial diplomacy has been focused on the energy and transportation sectors,” Custer said.

Last month, in a new report titled Corridors of Power, Custer and her coauthors analyzed how China used massive financial assistance to win friends and allies across Central and South Asia.

According to the report, the Chinese government directed $127 billion in financial assistance across 13 countries in Central and South Asia over nearly two decades. The five countries in Central Asia are among the biggest recipients of Beijing’s financial assistance.

“Kazakhstan alone attracted 26% ($33 billion) of Beijing’s financial assistance dollars,” Custer said, adding these investments were heavily focused on the China-Central Asia Gas Pipeline. “Turkmenistan was the second-largest Central Asian recipient of Chinese financing, worth $9 billion.”

Soft power investments

Even as Beijing emphasizes economics over soft power in Central Asia, it recognizes that these tools are most formidable when employed in concert, according to Custer.

“In this vein, Chinese leaders doubled down on soft power overtures via education, culture, exchange and media to foster people-to-people ties with Central Asian students and professionals over the last two decades,” Custer said, adding these efforts are important avenues to cultivate future markets for Chinese goods, services and capital in Central Asia.

In its bid to become a premier study-abroad destination for students from Central Asia, China offers less burdensome visa requirements than its competitors and financial assistance for education, according to the report.

“Kazakh and Kyrgyz students were top recipients of Chinese state-backed scholarships, and both countries received a large share of Beijing’s language and cultural promotion efforts in the form of Confucius Institutes at the university level and Confucius Classrooms at the primary and secondary school level,” Custer said.

Chinese leaders have also practiced city-level diplomacy to cultivate relationships with public and private sector leaders at the local level, according to the report.

“As a case in point: Turkmenistan’s Mary province received more money from Beijing over two decades than seven of the 13 countries in South and Central Asia,” Custer said. “Kazakhstan’s Atyrau, which received $5 billion, was the second-largest district-level recipient of Chinese state-backed financing in the entire region.”

Investing in security

China has also been investing in security in Central Asia, according to Emil Avdaliani, director of Middle East Studies at the Georgian think tank Geocase.

“Before, Russia was seen as the only and irreplaceable security provider,” Avdaliani said. “China has also penetrated the region. It operates a military base in Tajikistan, funds a new semi-military one there and has increased the number of drills with separate states in the region.”

Avdaliani said that even though China’s position in central Asian countries has evolved quite successfully, China still faces obstacles such as nationalism in the Central Asian states and political elites’ distrust of Beijing.

But the elite also sees that “the five states need China. They need investment, and in the longer run, they need China as a balancer against Russia,” Avdaliani told VOA in an email.

Beijing successfully uses this opportunity, and it is likely to continue in the future, he said.