worldpoliticswatch.com, 13 Nov 2006
BANGKOK, Thailand -- Gambling is illegal in China, but Macau, the special administrative enclave on the coast of Guangdong province, is this year expected to outstrip the United States' Las Vegas Strip with casino revenue turnover of about $7 billion.
The explosive growth of casino gambling in the tiny former Portuguese colony is yet another staggering statistic that illustrates the story of China's breakneck development.
Macau has been transformed in a few short years from a relatively sleepy, rather quaint oddity on the South China Sea into a brash waterfront of ugly, modern casino "resorts" that smother the old colonial architecture so carefully restored by Portugal before the handover to China in 1999.
By the end of this year, Macau is expected to have attracted almost 20 million "tourists," an official Chinese euphemism for gamblers. The enclave was swamped with 18.7 million last year, most all of them from across the Guangdong border.
But Macau's transformation is merely the biggest example of a trend across East Asia, where the barely suppressed gambling desires of the region are being increasingly met by a combination of illegal and legal casinos
