Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | January 2011 16 Macau Policy T here’s no such thing as a ‘free market’ as far as legalised casino gambling is concerned. All governments reserve for themselves the right to regulate the industry and in some way control access to the market. That can be by all kinds of methods, including limiting the number of licences issued, or controlling the way operators market services to customers. In Macau, however, other dynamics come into play in the relationship between the casino operators and the government and especially between the foreign operators and the government. These factors are only partly about the issue of protecting the population from the negative effects of gambling. They are also about a dynamic that has repeated itself throughout history in the relationship between the Oriental and Occidental worlds. This is the West trying to make a lot of money from tradewith the East, and the East wishing to learn from the West but cherry-picking those bits of Western technology and expertise that it likes, and casting aside or parrying the bits it doesn’t. It happened in earlier centuries. When the American mariner Commodore Matthew Perry first visited Japan in 1853 with the express aim of opening up the country to Western commerce, a high ranking Japanese Signs of Success Macau’s money making potential more than makes up for occasional cultural misunderstandings between East and West American mariner Commodore Matthew Perry– made 19th century Japan an offer it couldn’t refuse