Split Personality

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The Hot Seat
The man who has to cure the ill-effects of the casino boom is the man who started it: Edmund Ho, a 53-year-old former accountant who became Chief Executive of the Macau Special Administrative Region when it was returned to China by Portugal in 1999. When Ho took over, Macau was economically dormant. The gaming industry was a moribund monopoly controlled by tycoon Stanley Ho (who is unrelated to Edmund). Many residents of nearby Hong Kong stayed away from the city's seedy casinos because they feared they might be caught up in the occasional burst of gunfire on the streets between rival triad gangsters.

In just a few years, Edmund Ho turned the city around. He cracked down on crime and, more importantly, he introduced competition to the gaming market by issuing new casino licenses in 2002. Today there are six gaming operators. Eager to tap the burgeoning wealth of a rising China, some of the biggest names in gambling, including Las Vegas Sands, Wynn Resorts and MGM Mirage, came charging into Macau, and the economy roared. Ho was fêted as a miracle worker.

Now his halo has faded. Political opponents say Ho hasn't responded quickly enough to the city's growing problems. A light-rail system, needed to ease congestion in the city, was first proposed in 2003 but construction still hasn't begun. Labor advocates have demanded the government further restrict competition from foreign workers, build public housing and raise the minimum wage to alleviate the financial strain in the working class. Ho's administration was also brushed by scandal when his former Transport and Public Works Secretary, Ao Man-long, was sentenced to 27 years in prison in January for taking kickbacks on construction projects.

Equally threatening to Ho's standing, however, are rising calls for greater democracy. Under the current political system, Ho is effectively appointed by Beijing, but activists believe the needs of the city's downtrodden won't be properly met until their leadership becomes more accountable to Macanese. Ho and his policy team "are like Deng Xiaoping," says Antonio Ng, a member of Macau's Legislative Assembly and a democracy advocate. "They assume that if the economy's doing well, everything else will just fall into place. The way to address our problems is to change the government."

But having already contended with a noisy democracy movement in Hong Kong, Beijing has no taste for another in Macau. So the city's government is starting to tackle local problems. It is in the process of revising labor laws to provide greater protection for local workers, and in July, the Finance Secretary, Tam Pak-yuen, implored the casino operators to promote Macanese to higher managerial positions. Backed by Beijing, Ho is also putting the brakes on Macau's casino boom. In April, he froze the issuance of new gaming concessions and imposed a moratorium on new casino projects, beyond those already in progress. In July, Macau's government announced it would tighten visa restrictions for mainland tourists, halving the maximum length of their stay from 14 days to seven and requiring special approval to enter Macau via Hong Kong. The Macau police said the changes would help prevent potential mainland criminals from committing crimes during their stay, but many see the move as an attempt to curtail growth in the city's gambling market. Mainland Chinese, many of them wealthy high rollers, account for 55% of Macau's visitors.

These steps may slow the gambling boom, but to a cash-strapped populace, the sound of the clinking chips is simply too enticing to pass up. Lei Ka-ling, 20, opted out of college and enrolled instead in a free dealer-training course at the government-run Macao Tourism and Casino Career Centre. Lei says she had little choice. Her father, a hotel repairman, and mother, a janitor at a construction site, were barely able to support the family as Macau's costs rose. The salary Lei can earn as a dealer, roughly $1,900 a month, will instantly double the family income. "My parents encouraged me to go to college but our financial situation is already so tight that I decided on my own to become a dealer," she explains. Stories like Lei's have become so commonplace that Macau's authorities worry that the casinos will create an uneducated underclass of Macanese who lack the education to elevate themselves into the higher ranks of the industry. "They will become dealers forever," says the polytechnic's So. "They have high income but not a competitive position in society."

In his cramped apartment, Ng, the construction worker, worries that his two young sons will wind up dealing cards for a living instead of becoming bankers or policemen. "Working in a casino will have a bad influence on them," Ng says. There may be little, though, that he can do. Bruce Springsteen, in his classic song Atlantic City, tells of the dangerous mix of vice and hope that the casinos brought to the New Jersey shore. "Down here it's just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line," he sings. In Macau, too many are already on the wrong side.

— With reporting by Scarlet Ma/Macau