The Venetian casino in Macau has a replica of the Rialto Bridge, the Doge’s Palace, and the Campanile. Next door, the Parisian has an Eiffel Tower. It is a European theme park built on the last European colony in Asia, which was handed back to China in 1999. The layers of irony are architectural.
I put on the fanciest outfit I could muster after a month of travel and went in. The gambling floor is another world. Players sit with stacks of chips worth over a million euros, betting thousands on a single hand like it was nothing. No pictures allowed on the game floor. The minimum buy-in for poker was a thousand euros. I watched, I didn’t play.
Macau hosts the highest-stakes gambling in the world, eclipsing Las Vegas several times over. The money flowing through these rooms is staggering, and much of it comes from mainland China, where gambling is illegal. The SARs, Macau and Hong Kong, function as pressure valves for appetites that the mainland system doesn’t accommodate. Gambling here, financial markets there. The one-country-two-systems arrangement is economic as much as political.
What’s fascinating is how explicit it is. The mainland doesn’t pretend gambling doesn’t exist; it outsources it to a designated zone, a few hours by ferry. The same logic applies to Hong Kong’s financial markets, its free press (such as it remains), its common law system. The SARs are not exceptions to the Chinese model. They are part of it. Safety valves, built into the design, allowing pressures to release without threatening the structure.