inside asian gaming July 2014 4 EDITORIAL Inside Asian Gaming is an official media partner of: www.gamingstandards.com Inside Asian Gaming is published by Must Read Publications Ltd 5A FIT Center Avenida Comercial de Macau Macau Tel: (853) 8294 6755 For subscription enquiries, please email
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[email protected] Degrees of Fear U SA Today ran a piece last month on the 25th anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square that reflected, perversely enough, on the benefits. “It helped spark reforms,” suggested one Xian Liang, portfolio manager of US Global Investors’ China Region mutual fund. “It was part of the tipping point where [Chinese leaders] realized that the priority for government policy was to create jobs and [allow people to] grow rich. That basically jump-started privatization. It unleashed entrepreneurship and gave the country’s growth a big leg up.” When the tanks rolled into Beijing that fateful summer of 1989 the Shanghai Composite Index, today one of the most watched in the world, didn’t exist. The Shanghai Stock Exchange had been dark for 50 years, shuttered since the founding of the People’s Republic. Today it is the world’s seventh-largest. Its formal reopening on 19th December 1990 marked the birth of modern China. Two watershed events, occurring just 18 months apart, kindred symbols of a time when politics and economics collided with a force that draws blood and pulverizes dreams, when possibility is forced to give way to necessity, as it always must—the crucible in which world powers are forged. As we look at the current unraveling of “One Country/Two Systems” in Hong Kong and its impact on Macau it’s worth thinking about how these realities still speak to us, albeit in very different terms depending on your side of the Pearl River Delta. Hong Kongers have battled considerable opposition to found a museum dedicated to the Tiananmen Square victims, while Macau has allowed a fabulous old temple up near the Border Gate—Lin Fong, the “Lotus Peak Temple”—to be recast as a shrine to post-handover patriotism in the form of the Lin Zexu Memorial Museum. In the temple courtyard just outside this showplace of clunky historical distortion and central government propaganda is an imposing statue of the man himself, scourge of the foreign imperialists, his granite gaze frozen in distant, paternalistic benevolence. Lin was the imperial commissioner sent to Canton (modern-day Guangzhou) in 1839 to eradicate the opium trade, and it was to Lin Fong that he summoned the Portuguese authorities to order them to expel the bad guys, Brits and Americans mostly, which they promptly did. With nowhere to go (Lin was about to expel all Westerners from Canton as well) the traders made for the waters off the rocky coast of Hong Kong, an obscure fishing village hugging what the British already knew to be one of the finest deep water harbors they’d ever visited. It was Hong Kong’s subsequent rise as a colony of the British crown that hastened Macau’s economic decline and led the Portuguese to the expedient of legalized gambling, preceded from China’s standpoint by military disaster, and Lin was cashiered by his emperor in the first days of it and banished at the age of 65 to remote Xinjiang, where he spent most of the last few years of his life, a largely forgotten figure until the second half of the 20th century when a revolution in need of heroes resurrected him as something of a founding father of the Communist state. Today there are Lin Zexu monuments and museums all over China. The point about Lin Zexu is that he is a figure of enormous historical significance, the embodiment of China’s failure in its imperial twilight to grasp the nature of the modern world that was banging at its door. He especially had no interest in the perspective of those he’d come to discipline, the “Southern Barbarians,” as the Qing were wont to refer to the Cantonese, who of all their countrymen were closest to that world, and the reign of terror he unleashed among them made the Anglo-Chinese War all but inevitable. Beijing may not have directly caused the political and economic crisis currently gripping Hong Kong, but its overt hostility to the discontent it’s raised up would have been easier to rationalize in Lin Zexu’s time. The infamous “white paper” emphasizing central government authority (as if anyone seriously questions that) and dismissing judicial independence was a remarkable display of tone-deafness and bad timing. The accusations of disloyalty, of foreign conspiracies, the PLA threats, it all seems almost calculated to force a confrontation. No doubt this has contributed to some of the recent skittishness among gaming investors on the other side of the Delta. The smart money, though, senses that the worse things get in Hong Kong the more attentive the central government has to be to Macau’s economic well- being and more sensitive therefore to the requirements of its principal industry. This suggests that it will refrain frommessing unduly with the ability of its citizens to bring in more money and stay longer than its laws allow, the two biggest fears that have hammered share prices. Different realities, Macau and Hong Kong. So much less to be afraid of here than over there. Lin Zexu