Book review: Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China’s Consumer Revolution

Tim Simpson, Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China’s Consumer Revolution, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2023; 384 pp.: ISBN: 9781517900311, £23.98/US$30.00 (pbk); ISBN: 9781517900304, £95.95/US$120.00 (hbk); ISBN: 9781452969886, £23.98/US$30.00 (eBook).

Betting on Macau is one of the first comprehensive monographs about urban metamorphosis in China’s Special Administrative Region Macau in the period after handover in 1999. The staple reference on Macau’s pre handover, the work of Clayton (2009), inspired this book (as pointed out by the author himself) but the book is conceptually different and covers the period of Macau’s rapid urban growth following the turning point often termed as gaming liberalisation (in 2001) – the opening of the city’s casino market from a monopoly concession to an oligopoly concession system.

The author uses an approach of assemblage, where different components are seen in relationship with others – all these elements are duly organised and have dedicated chapters. The components of the assemblage are diverse and of different spatial scales: from the megamachine of the Special Economic Zone planning to the retail velvet rope designed to cultivate the queuing discipline among customers (p. 217), from the integrated resort VIP rooms design to the cognac tasting ritual (p. 279). All of these elements, sites and devices make up the force moulding the urban cultural system in Macau (p. 181).

The book aims to show how the urban changes have been caused by the city’s long-term orientation towards casinos as the key generators of economic growth. These urban changes are discussed in relation to the city’s catering towards tourists, making the mainland Chinese tourist/visitor/consumer in Macau the key subject under scrutiny.

The author uses and elaborates the book’s pivotal term casino capitalism to conceptualise the urban and social developments in Macau. The definition of casino capitalism given by the author refers to the didactic role played by Macau’s casino resorts in China’s economic reforms, and the comportment of those nascent Chinese consumers (p. 3).

The book is composed of three parts and nine chapters. Each part analyses a facet of capitalism’s genesis in relation to Macau –‘a new core city of Chinese capitalism’ (p. 112). The first part is dedicated to Macau’s historical role in global capitalism as an entrepot between China and the West. It also highlights the spatio-economical relationships of Macau as a postcolonial special administrative region with special economic zones (urban and political mechanism that spurred Chinese economic reforms). The second part deals with Macau’s ‘pedagogical regime’ of casino capitalism (p. 35) and the city’s role as an experimental laboratory of consumption. Finally, the third part is about Macau’s function in Chinese capitalism in the reform era economy.

Each part in its turn explores a specific apparatus from a meta level of the Greater Bay Area urban agglomeration as a ‘megamachine’ (p. 104), to macro level apparatus of an integrated resort and its components, such as casinos, shopping malls and the private VIP rooms (Part 2) to micro or individual level apparatus, such as a baccarat machine as a gaming device interacting directly on an individual level with a gambler (Part 3). In the final chapter the author suggests looking at Macau’s Venetian Resort as a locus of national, regional and global scales of the capitalist world economy transformation.

The book opens with a very engaging and at the same time, rather concise, historical account that allows us to grasp the context which led to the emerging casino capitalism in Macau. The context is crucial in understanding the key research object of the book – the new canonical figure of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the mobile urban tourist as a driving force of the transformations of the territory of Macau.

It ain’t Vegas– one of the key points suggests looking at Macau as a unique laboratory of China as an emerging consumer society but at the same time inviting necessary comparison with Las Vegas. Macau is thus, despite its size and population, an important vantage point for the analysis of Chinese consumerism and Sino-capitalism. Among many models used in China as models of success or moral behaviour, Macau is a model of performative urban economics where mass tourism is mobilised as a contributor to economic development and formation (and education) of a high quality (high suzhi) Chinese urban resident.

The book is an important milestone in understanding one of the multiple logics of urban development in China. And while Macau is unique, its assemblage of ‘powerful thing’ components is also unique, and its formula cannot be so easily extrapolated elsewhere. Nevertheless, it shows how a city can undergo tremendous changes with the dominance of one particular economic vehicle. With so many cities in Asia diversifying to attract gambling tourists, Macau is an important case of reference in itself for understanding the growth of Asian urban consumers.

Besides its relevance to urban theory, the book is also an excellent study that provides insights into the technologisation of luck/fortune – a key element in Chinese culture and vision of life, a strong belief that luck is generated and controlled by the apparatus of heavens, but humans can and should try to alter the outcomes as well. The newly created integrated resorts with their mini-Eiffel tower, Westminster Clock Tower and Venetian canals are meaningful spatial devices, ‘enclosures’ that produce and regulate a particular kind of (luck-seeking) consumer subjects. By looking at Macau Tim Simpson suggests that we educate our vision of the Chinese urban environment and look beyond the ornamental facades with seemingly simulated characteristics and ‘focus instead on the materiality and the articulation of the design with the antecedent spaces of the socialist Chinese city’ (p. 179).

While the book is important for specialists interested in the processes of urbanisation in China or in wider Asia, it is also an invaluable study about the shaping of an urban Chinese and contemporary ‘Chineseness’– and thus will appeal to a much wider audience interested in Chinese studies or indeed understanding the phenomenon of Sino-globalism.

The book is also appropriately complemented by images (many of them are the result of collaboration with the photographer Adam Lampton) that give a better glimpse of Macau as an urban and cultural edifice in the constant state of change.

References

Clayton C (2009) Sovereignty at the Edge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Google Scholar

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