The last decade has seen Macao’s gambling industry grow at supersonic speeds.
Since Macau was returned to China in 1999, it has overtaken Las Vegas to become the world’s biggest gambling mecca.
The next building trend was to expand into a global entertainment and high end shopping hub along with leisure activities, but that has not matched the success of gambling.
Gambling remains Macao’s main money maker. Almost every business depends on gambling to survive.
However, the days of Chinese Triads having shooting wars for control of the streets have gone.
Instead, Macao has become a territory where Chinese democracy advocates may speak out without fear and become elected to Macao’s legislature.
The PRC has promised not to meddle in Macao’s politics.
One thing seems apparent. Many in Macao want the economy to have diversity that does not need to rely on gambling.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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Most Westerns, specifically Americans, when he or she sees the word “China” in the Chicago Sun-Times headline will believe this is another example of China’s corruption and that impression will continue after reading the piece.
In fact, the headline should have read, “MGM picks reputed Macao crime family over N.J.”
Macao is not China even though it technically belongs of the People’s Republic. The World History Blog provides a short history of the former Portuguese colony, which is a Special Administrative Region in China today but has more in common with the Principality of Monaco or Las Vegas.
Macao’s location was first settled by members of the South Sung Dynasty escaping invading Mongols in 1277. Later, in 1516, Portuguese traders built a staging port there, the oldest European settlement in the Far East.
The Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1643) did not recognize that Portugal ruled over Macao and collected rent until 1849 when the Portuguese, taking advantage of China’s defeat during the first opium war with England and France, declared Macau’s independence from China.
Old Macau in 1960
Britannica tells us that Macao was returned to China in 1999. However, the transfer agreement allowed Macao to govern itself with a one-house legislature and a legal system based on Portuguese law — not China’s legal system.
Macao has a small security force to protect the 11.3 square mile (29.2 square kilometer) area, but defense is the responsibility of the central government in Beijing.
Since 2000, the gambling and tourist industry has been increasingly important to Macao’s economy and the city has become the playground of global tourists, nearby Hong Kong and wealthy mainland Chinese.
David Campion says, “As in Havana and Las Vegas, the gambling economy in Macau was first built up and its rules enforced by clever and well-organized gangsters, here called Triads. Once a date was set for the departure of the Portuguese, the Triads fought amongst each other viciously for greater control over the territory before the PRC was due to come in and rain on their parade (which it didn’t, as it turned out).”
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
My wife and I went to see Inside Job, and I returned home thinking that China should maintain tight control over its financial sector and continue to keep out disruptive elements such as the Tibetan and Islamic separatists and the Falun GongReligious Cult.
In addition, China must keep locking up dissidents that want China to become a full-blown, so-called democracy as the US claims to be.
In fact, I suspect the same people (named in the documentary) that produced the 2008 global economic crises want to have their go at China’s money to see how much of that they may legally steal once they change Chinese laws for their purposes.
I seriously question that America is still a democracy or a republic.
Instead, America seems controlled by a few huge US banks and Wall Street. The rest of us peasants are being relegated to the position of modern-day debt serfs who must pay for the greed and mistakes of a few.
Anyone that believes that China is more corrupt than America, think again. I’d rather deal with China’s corruption challenges than the moral and ethical corruption that plagues America’s financial sector.
If you know how much the 2008 economic crisis cost the globe, you will know the extent of that American corruption. Global Issues pegs that global loss at about 62 trillion.
“Inside Job” Trailer
For those who continue to blame China for stealing US jobs, the Pew Economic Policy Groupsays the 2008 economic crises that started in the US cost 5.5 million Americans their jobs and another 4 million jobs that would have been created.
In China, about 15 million jobs were lost resulting in more than 80,000 demonstrations and riots across the country.
Millions more jobs were lost outside China and the US.
Reuters says, “Inside Job … is a must-see for pretty much everybody.”
“This is not a piece of ragged muckraking or breathless advocacy,” the NY Times says. “It rests its outrage on reason, research and careful argument.”
The sad fact is that this documentary was only in the art house that shows films in our area that do not have the popularity of a “Megamind” or a “Harry Potter” film.
We were part of an audience of five.
It doesn’t matter if US citizens vote Republican or Democratic. It is obvious that President Reagan let the sociopathic foxes into the hen house and both Bushes, Clinton and now President Obama are feeding our chickens to those foxes.
Unfortunately, I agree with the comments I’ve read on the Internet that say no matter how many people see Inside Job nothing will change. This malignant cancer has spread too far.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
The History Channel produced a documentary on organized Crime in China. For two thousand years, secret societies have been part of Chinese culture.
Most of these secret societies were harmless but a few were highly organized criminal organizations. Under emperors and Communists, in war and peace, Chinese crime lords have acted as shadow governments with their own laws and severe forms of punishment.
In recent decades, Chinese gangs have moved into major American cities. Today, they deal in more than gambling and drugs. They deal in human trafficking.
This segment of the History Channel documentary starts by showing a cargo container in Hong Kong being used to smuggle Chinese citizens into the US.
Over the last two decades, the business of smuggling people into the US by Chinese organized crime has boomed.
Many poor Chinese want to start a new life in the United States, which is known as Gold Mountain.
However, the risks are big and costly. Each person may have to pay as much as 40 thousand dollars to the smugglers often ending in a form of slavery in America until the debt is paid.
Kingman Wong of the FBI says these smugglers are like the flu because they are always mutating their methods and alliances to find new ways to smuggle illegal aliens in to the US. There are hundreds of independent groups operating like this around the globe.
However, the beginnings of all this illegal activity may be traced to one group from the past — the Triads. The first such group was known as the “Heaven and Earth Association” and may have started in 1761 AD.
See the first post on this Blog about Organized Crime in China
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Corruption is a fact-of-life in Asia and China may be one of the few country in Asia doing something about it. Country rankings in Asia are dismal compared to Western democracies and Singapore.
Of 178 countries ranked for corruption, Myanmar (Burma) scores 176 and is tied with Afghanistan as two of the most corrupt countries on the planet.
Iraq is 175. Laos and Cambodia are 154. Vietnam is 116, and Indonesia is 110.
Even India, the world’s largest democracy, is ranked 87. Singapore, for comparison, is tied for first place as one of the least corrupt countries.
In fact, two of the least corrupt countries in Asia are Thailand and China tied at 78.
The power of the Chinese peasant demonstrated in this video may have something to do with China’s improved score as one of the least corrupt nations in Asia.
It may come as a surprise to many Western critics but in rural China, democracy’s ballot box has been active at the village level since the mid 1980s.
In 1997, The Independent reported that China’s rural peasants were discovering the power of the ballot box.
“Under Communist Party rule, village elections are the only example of one-person, one-vote democracy in China. Launched in the mid-eighties, they were originally introduced to replace the village communes that were dissolved after the Cultural Revolution.”
Few outside China paid much attention to this move toward China’s rural democracy. Nearly one million villages hold elections and each time there is an election, the peasants learn more about democracy in action.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
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