Editors

D. Schwartz (Ed.)

Document Type

Occasional Paper

Publication Date

2-2019

Publication Title

Center for Gaming Research Occasional Paper Series: Paper 46

Publisher Location

Las Vegas, Nevada

Issue

46

First page number:

1

Last page number:

7

Abstract

In 1999, after nearly half a millennia of administration, Portugal returned the citystate of Macau to the People’s Republic of China, and it was designated a Special Administrative Region under the PRC’s “one country, two systems” regime. Less than a decade after the handover Macau was transformed into the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming, and today the city is visited by more than 35 million annual tourists, the majority of whom are from mainland China. Macau’s remarkable economic expansion may be in part attributed to the city’s ambiguous sovereignty, an endemic characteristic which dates to the city’s founding in 1557, and which has long been its most advantageous asset. In this paper I analyze a three-year wave of violent crime, known colloquially as the Casino Wars, which was attributed to Chinese organized crime groups and which plagued Macau’s casino gaming industry in the period just prior to the handover. I seek to understand the relevance of the Casino Wars for the city’s status today as a special Chinese territory, and the way in which that exceptional semi-sovereign status allows Macau to function as a site of governmental policy innovation and experimentation with specific relevance for China’s ongoing market reforms.

Keywords

Macau; Sovereignty; triads; Chinese tourism; State-transnational network; Model experiment

Disciplines

Gaming and Casino Operations Management | Hospitality Administration and Management | Tourism and Travel

File Format

pdf

File Size

302 KB

Language

English

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