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MACAU: Tourism Has Grown, but Gambling Is Still the Name of the Game

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Dec 20 2004 (IPS) - A glance at Macau on the fifth anniversary of its handover by Portugal shows that the economy of this special administrative region of China has grown, regional integration has been strengthened, and the tourism industry has expanded.

However, this tiny 19-square-kilometre territory continues to bet on gambling.

Although tourism has been flourishing over the past five years, Macau’s casinos still account for 73.6 percent of the peninsula’s total revenues.

However, distribution of wealth has become somewhat more balanced, reducing the inequalities arising from the Portuguese administration’s allocation of benefits, which rarely reached the lower income sectors.

In an interview with Portugal’s national news agency Lusa, Macau’s Chief Executive Edmund Ho acknowledged that a portion of the population continues to live in precarious conditions, earning low wages and without the benefits that would be in keeping with the economic indicators of a developed society.

To combat social injustice and raise the living standards of this former Portuguese enclave on China’s southern coast, Ho has proposed putting an emphasis on education, creating a special fund to address the needs of the elderly, overhauling the pensions system, and continuing to follow a policy of careful handling of public funds.

Despite these differences with the former Portuguese administration, the Chinese government has taken special care not to criticise Lisbon, maintaining intact relations that have been considered exemplary by the governments of both countries for five centuries.

China has even reinforced the former colony’s Portuguese heritage by turning it into a kind of Asian platform for cooperation with the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), which consists of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, Sao Tome and Principe, and East Timor.

Of the 37,000 Portuguese citizens who were living in Macau until 1999, there are just 1,200 still on the peninsula today, and Portuguese is only spoken at home now by no more than 10,000 of the 450,000 Macanese, most of whom are of mixed Portuguese and Chinese descent.

>From a historic point of view, the Dec. 20, 1999 ceremony in which the last Portuguese governor, Gen. Vasco de Rocha Vieira, handed over the reins to Ho (who was designated by Beijing), marked a symbolic watershed in the troubled history of European colonialism in Asia.

More than a mere handing-over of power, the transfer that occurred five years ago Monday put a peaceful end, amidst a festive climate, to just over five centuries of European presence in Asia.

Those 502 years began in 1498 with the arrival of Portuguese Admiral Vasco da Gama’s fleet to the coast of India, which kicked off a long series of incursions, invasions and settling of colonies by the Portuguese, British, French, Dutch and Spaniards in the world’s most populous continent.

But in strictly formal terms, an interpretation to which China attaches great importance, as indicated by the statements of Chinese leaders, Macau was never actually a colony.

>From 1557 to 1999, Macau’s formal status was a “Chinese territory under Portuguese administration”. The rocky territory was originally awarded to Portugal in exchange for clearing the South China Sea of Malaysian pirates, who were causing major human and material losses and curbing China’s trade with its neighbours.

Three centuries later, the British also established a foothold on the Chinese coast when Hong Kong – now one of the world’s main financial centres – became a British colony in 1841.

But unlike Macau, the Chinese did consider Hong Kong, which is also a special administrative region of China today, a colony in the strictest sense of the term.

China has always emphasised that difference between Hong Kong and the tiny Macau, whose population of under half a million amounts to less than one-fifth of the total number of inhabitants of the former British colony.

The events held to commemorate Monday’s anniversary were presided over by Chinese President Hu Jintao in Macau and his Portuguese counterpart Jorge Sampaio in Lisbon.

According to the foreign minister of Portugal, Antonio Monteiro, China has lived up to every point of the agreement for Macau’s return, which was similar to that of Hong Kong, based on the principle of “one country, two systems”.

The Macau handover agreement also stipulates that all Portuguese economic and cultural interests are to be preserved for 50 years.

What this has meant in practice is that Portugal has been able to continue doing profitable business in Macau without the need to incur the high costs involved in running a public administration of 3,700 functionaries appointed by Lisbon and maintaining the governor’s pompous palace and honour guard.

In today’s Macau, Portugal Telecom (PT) holds a 28 percent share in the telephone company and a 50 percent stake in the cable TV station, in addition to owning 5.1 percent of Directel-Macau, 18.5 percent of Telesat and 6.6 percent of Cosmos.

This “demonstrates Macau’s significance for the expansion of our international operations and our chances of expanding in the region,” PT president Miguel Horta e Costa said last Friday in an interview with the Lisbon publication Jornal de Negocios.

Air-Macau, meanwhile, is controlled by Transportes Aéreos Portugueses, and more than 51 percent of the shares in the Macau international airport are in the hands of Portugal’s National Airport Administration.

Moreover, “the Chinese have decided that Portugal should be their contact in the CPLP, and countries of the size of Brazil are seeking out China’s markets, concluding that it is easier to penetrate them through Portugal, via Macau,” said Carlos Monjardino, governor of the enclave in 1986 and 1987, and currently the chairman of the Fundacao Oriente (Orient Foundation).

The numbers indicate that it is easy to turn a profit in Macau, with its strong economy.

Between 1999 and 2004, access to Macau’s casinos gradually opened up to people from the rest of China, a cross-border industrial park was created, and an economic and trade cooperation agreement was signed with China.

All of these developments have repeatedly been described by Ho as “essential” to maintaining growth, diversifying sources of revenue, and facing up to international competition.

The results are plain to see: from January to November 2004, Macau received 15.2 million tourists, which represented a 42 percent increase on the same period in 2003, based on a nearly 72 percent rise in the number of visitors from China. And economic growth has reached 40 percent over the past four years.

Nevertheless, Ho has repeatedly expressed a cautious stance with respect to the promising future that the gaming industry would appear to hold for Macau, the leading gambling centre in Asia and the second in the world after Las Vegas, Nevada – precisely because the industry is literally a gamble, and could at any moment take a nosedive.

But Professor Carlos Piteira with the Institute of Social and Political Sciences at Lisbon’s Technical University believes that “Macau hardly has any economic alternative other than gambling,” despite the fact that the special administrative region is “an open door” for China’s interests in the CPLP and vice versa.