With its half scale Eiffel Tower and intelligent design, Parisian Macao puts an exclamation point on Sheldon Adelson’s Cotai dream for Sands China.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes, editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming and author of Hong Kong On Air
In January, Macau’s gaming revenue fell for the 20th straight month compared to a year earlier. But Chinese New Year and aberrantly low February 2015 revenue could mean that Macau revenue ends its losing streak this month. But one uptick doesn’t make a recovery.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes, editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming and author of Hong Kong On Air
Tough times for the world’s gaming capital show little sign of abating. Macau’s casino revenue fell 35.5% in August, its fifteenth straight month of year on year decreases. That follows a 34.5% gaming revenue decline in July. China’s slowing economy and President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive have driven Macau’s slump, but mainland stock market chaos and currency devaluation make recovery more difficult.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes and author of Hong Kong On Air
Union Gaming Research Macau analysts crossed over the border into mainland China for a reality check on the much discussed crackdown on transit visas to Macau that’s hit casino share prices over the past week. Analysts Grant Govertsen and Felicity Chiang found that it’s business as usual for the transit visa cottage industry in neighboring Zhuhai.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes and author of Hong Kong On Air
US leaker Edward Snowden’s short, unhappy stay in Hong Kong highlighted the confusion about my adopted hometown’s status under Chinese sovereignty. The July 1 anniversary of the 1997 Hong Kong handover is a good opportunity to clear things up.
First, let me say that, like most Hong Kongers, I’m of two minds about Snowden, though perhaps for different reasons. I’ve held a US security clearance, and I didn’t take the responsibility lightly. I also can imagine the weight Barack Obama’s administration feels to protect the American public because, unlike the George W Bush people, it can’t bask in the belief that an attack that kills thousands of Americans is science fiction. It’s also a political fact that the Obama administration got more heat for a guy on an airplane with explosives in his underwear who was apprehended without causing damage than the Bush administration got for ignoring a memo that warned Al Qaeda was determined to strike the US and doing nothing to prevent the thousands of deaths that resulted from that tragedy (not to mention the phony war it drummed up in its aftermath), unless buying expensive shoes, sporting a bad haircut and flapping your overbite are anti-terrorism measures.
I also feel very strongly about the right to privacy and snooping into our personal lives. I’m quite sympathetic to the argument that the National Security Agency wasn’t collecting any more information than Google, phone companies and big data aggregators do. To me, that means we should be fully exposing and debating what those private companies do, rather than expanding these hidden privileges to the government.
Snowden presented Hong Kong with an unwelcome dilemma. It was caught in the middle of a dispute involving two of its most important partners. His disclosure of US spying at Chinese University of Hong Kong rightly raised questions about the US-Hong Kong relationship. Snowden’s revelations of US cyber espionage on the mainland provided juicy political ammunition for China to counter US accusations of China’s hacking of US targets. But the US-China relationship is far more important than anything Snowden could offer. So getting him out of their hair Hong Kong was a good thing for all.
It was troubling to see Cyd Ho, one of Hong Kong’s leading pan-democratic politicians, ask Beijing to reveal its position on Snowden before Hong Kong courts heard his case. But it’s not Hong Kong’s place to get in the middle of a Sino-American dispute, unless Hong Kong itself is the subject.
But far more wrongheaded than Cyd Ho’s deference to Beijing was the stream of US politicians bloviating about Snowden taking his secrets to China, as if Hong Kong is just another city in China. The whole point of Hong Kong’s status as a special administrative region (SAR) of China is that it’s not just another city in China.
The Basic Law, the mini-constitution for post-handover Hong Kong, guarantees the former British colony a “high degree of autonomy” in its domestic affairs for 50 years, with Beijing having a leading role in defense and foreign affairs only. (Snowden’s connection to foreign affairs gives local politicians an excuse for deferring to the mainland.) That high degree of autonomy includes freedom of expression and western style civil liberties that remain distant dreams in the mainland. Hong Kong has more than 7 million people, its own currency, its own courts and its own official language. There’s still a border between the Hong Kong and mainland, and citizens of each need permission to cross it. Deng Xiaoping summed up relationship best: “one country-two systems.”
The Hong Kong government makes it own laws with the help of an elected legislature. The electoral system isn’t terribly fair, but as much blame for that lies with the British and Hong Kong elite as Beijing. The British ruled undemocratically for 150 years and only began caring about giving Hong Kong’s masses a voice when the clock was running out. The local Chinese elite the colonial government leaned on were largely disinclined to cede power.
The relationship between China and Hong Kong is not analogous to the US government and a state. It’s more like the US relationship with Puerto Rico; few American would say that a person who went to Puerto Rico had thrown himself into the arms of the US intelligence services. But the US and Puerto Rico are in some ways closer than Hong Kong and China: Chinese citizens cannot freely visit, live and work in Hong Kong and vice versa.
As I wrote in Hong Kong On Air
Hours after the handover (and completely unrelated to it), the Asian economic crisis hit the region as currencies collapsed. The crisis began China’s transformation from a supporting player amid the Asian tiger economies to the region’s leading dragon. Before the handover, Hong Kong expected to be the rich teacher to the mainland, but Hong Kong and China’s economic fortunes were abruptly reversed. Since the handover and the SARS epidemic of 2003, Hong Kong’s economy has become far more dependent on the mainland.
Despite that development, grassroots Hong Kong recognizes that loving China and doing business with it doesn’t mean loving the Communist Party’s rule. People here rose up against a plan to put mainland propaganda into the school curriculum and continue to campaign for free, direct election of Hong Kong’s chief executive, its head of government. Tens of thousands of Hong Kongers turn out annually to commemorate the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown that still cannot be spoken of across the border.
But Hong Kong’s elite have always been dependent on whoever’s in charge. Propaganda about Hong Kong and Singapore as the world’s freest economies notwithstanding, local tycoons got rich by kowtowing to leadership for favors and licenses. For example, property is the source of most wealth in Hong Kong and the government owns all the land, not exactly the way Adam Smith drew it up. Hong Kong’s rigged electoral system gives those tycoons disproportionate say in the legislature and lets Beijing chose the people who choose the chief executive. These so-called leaders put far greater emphasis on “one country” than “two systems” and skew outsiders’ views of Hong Kong. Their laxity about safeguarding Hong Kong’s prerogatives represents the small circle that elects them, not the majority of Hong Kongers.
What the tycoons and their acolytes fail to recognize is that they have the most to lose if Hong Kong really does become just another Chinese city. Fortunately, the people who ride the subway instead of Rolls Royces and Bentleys keep standing up to prevent it from happening. At least some of us recognize where our best interests really lie.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air
As China picks its next leadership in a discussion among a tiny fraction of its elite, the vast majority of Chinese are still just trying to get by.
Sheng Keyi’s novel Northern Girls depicts the lives of migrants from the countryside to cities that have helped fuel the China’s meteoric economic growth. Sheng moved from Hubei province to Sheng to work as a young woman and published Northern Girls in Chinese in 2004; the English translation was released this year. Northern Girls can be seen as a fictional prelude to Factory Girls
I talked to Sheng at the last month’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali last month. Our interview vividly portrays the inheritance of China’s new leadership: a society that’s increasingly unequal, where material wealth expands alongside moral bankruptcy. The interview, posted on Asia Times, is also a reminder that many Chinese novelists living in China do their best to stretch the limits of state tolerance. Like leaving behind family and the familiar for the unknown metropolis – as my own mother did, moving from Portland, Maine, to New York City – writing from the heart in China remains an act of extraordinary courage with no guarantees beyond plenty of hard work in a hard place.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air
Over the past few months, Macau casino revenues have disappointed. October’s new revenue record of MOP27.7 billion (US$3.46 billion), while welcome, represented a modest 3.2 percent increase over revenue a year ago. But behind the numbers, key changes are taking place that will transform Macau.
After years of increasing domination by VIP players provided by junket operators, for about a year mass market gamblers have been driving revenue growth. As I wrote in the October issue of Macau Business, the trend will show its biggest impact beyond the casino floor.
A related trend is the swing toward Cotai, covered in the July issue of Macau Business. Three casino operators already have resorts in Cotai, the entertainment area built on landfill between Macau’s outer islands, and this year the government has approved development applications from the other three. By the end of 2017, there will be at least six new developments in Cotai, built for some US$15 billion.
Things will surely be different by then. But Macau’s shakeup has already begun, with its effect felt as far away as Beijing and Wall Street.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air
Fifteen years ago today was the apex of Hong Kong’s time as the center of the universe. My novel Hong Kong On Air
Fifteen years later, you can debate whether China has become the center of the universe or whether Hong Kong is better or worse now. What’s certain is that Hong Kong has become far more dependent on China. The Asian economic crash of 1997 that immediately followed the handover – but had its causes elsewhere – and the 2003 SARS epidemic combined to turn the tables on the relationship between Hong Kong and China. It may have been a coincidence brought about by events, or it may be the product a calculated strategy by Beijing, but today Hong Kong needs China far more than China needs Hong Kong.
CY Leung takes the helm today as Hong Kong Chief Executive as the unelected head of the territory, chosen by a handful of handpicked Beijing loyalists. Beijing has promised that five years from today the chief executive being sworn in will be chosen in a free, democratic election by all the people of Hong Kong. If Hong Kong and China hope to enjoy a new version of the golden times Hong Kong On Air
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air
When asked why he robbed banks, legendary holdup man Willie Sutton replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” America’s Internal Revenue Service is breaking that rule to target US citizens living overseas. The IRS is mandating billions in government and private sector resources to gather unprecedented levels of financial information to conduct what’s probably a wild goose chase for overseas tax cheats born of bureaucratic sophistry.
The drive to more closely monitor the estimated 5.3 million American citizens living abroad grew out of a crackdown on tax cheats inside the US. Swiss banking giant UBS – where former Texas Senator Phil Gramm serves as vice chairman – actively recruited citizens within the 50 states to participate in tax evasion schemes using overseas bank accounts. That led to increased scrutiny of overseas bank accounts, and since nearly all Americans living overseas have foreign bank accounts, they’ve become primary targets.
As I wrote for Asia Times, the new regime includes a vast expansion of heretofore largely unenforced rules on reporting of overseas bank accounts that will extend to investments and even credit card transactions, creating mountains of data for the already overburdened IRS and huge new headaches for overseas banks, brokers and US citizens.
Many in the financial services industry are balking, and many Americans see the new rules as invasions of privacy. China-based US accountant Laurence Lipsher, author of Larry’s 2011 Tax Guide for US Expats and Green Card Holders in User Friendly English, fears the IRS request for comments on the new rules could be like Chairman Mao’s “Let 100 Bloom” campaign that was used to identify dissidents.
The thirst for government revenue in the face of mounting budget deficits helps fuel the focus on expatriates, since more Willie Suttonic ideas such as closing corporate loopholes or raising taxes on top earners are off the table. While some Americans overseas claim that second home in Monte Carlo as tax residence or live lavishly in company-paid villas with servants and limos, most are just working stiffs, often getting by on incomes laughable by US standards.
In one instance documented by American Citizens Abroad, an expatriate that accepted the IRS “voluntary disclosure” invitation to correct previous oversights found tax liabilities of less than $200 accompanied by penalties of $60,000 on their $300,000 life savings.
What would Willie say?
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air
In 2010, Macau gaming revenue set another new record at 188.34 billion Macau patacas ($23.5 billion), capped with its biggest monthly haul ever in December. Gaming industry experts are convinced that Beijing will continue permitting vast quantities of the mainland’s wealth to leave via Macau’s baccarat tables.
But grassroots Macau benefits little from its influx of tourists and money, and there’s no coherent plan to change that. Efforts at diversifying the economy from its reliance on gaming, in the few cases where they’ve progressed past the talking stage, remain fruitless. As I wrote in Asia Times, the hospitality industry suffers from a plague of Macau see, Macau do: emulating rivals’ (mainly unsuccessful) ideas rather than daring to be original. The government looks increasingly unable to spend its vast wealth, now estimated are more than $25 billion for a city of 550,000, to benefit residents.
Macau has become a great place to bet or buy Gucci, but an increasingly poor place to live and work. In the long run, that’s not good for anyone. Even if Macau’s ruling elite and gaming industry don’t realize it, Beijing surely does.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air
Muhammad Cohen 