Neoliberal exception? The liberalization of Macau’s casino gaming monopoly and the genealogy of the post-socialist Chinese subject

Abstract

Following Portugal’s return of Macau to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, the local government liberalized the city’s casino gaming monopoly and opened the industry to foreign investment. As a result, Macau has become the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming revenue, and a model for other regional states which are pursuing casino gaming-driven development. This article entails a post-structural analysis of neoliberal governance in Macau and a genealogy of the resulting post-socialist consumer subject. Framed by a critical engagement with Aihwa Ong’s theory of “neoliberalism as exception,” analysis reveals that Macau’s economic growth was enhanced, not by optimizing technocratic rationalities, but by reactive measures taken up by different actors, at several different scales, to address three governance crises of public order, public finance, and public health. What appear to be neoliberal interventions in the Macau economy are often exposed as contemporary iterations of latent governmental forms. These various factors form a dispositif, or apparatus, of subjectification.

Keywords

biopolitical casino genealogy integrated resort urban laboratory neoliberalism spatial ontology

Portugal returned the territory of Macau to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1999, 2 years after Britain’s return of Hong Kong. At the time of the handover, Macau was the last remaining European colony in Asia, a largely overlooked city with a stagnant economy and little prospect for growth. Over the past decade, however, Macau has emerged as the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming, with revenues of US$45 billion in 2013, an amount seven times greater than the revenue produced that year by the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. Today Macau’s new phantasmagoric cityscape serves as a potent exemplar for a variety of Asian and Pacific states which hope to leverage casino gaming tourism and the “integrated resort” model as a tool of social and economic development. Government officials, entrepreneurs, investors, and urban planners in Singapore, South Korea, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Saipan, the Philippines, and Myanmar are seeking to emulate aspects of the Macau model in their own casino development projects and resort designs.

Gambling has been legal in Macau since 1847 and traditionally operated as a monopoly concession granted by the Portuguese colonial government to a private entrepreneur in exchange for a percentage of the revenue. Hong Kong businessman Stanley Ho was granted the city’s casino monopoly in 1961 and held it for 40 years, becoming a billionaire several times over in the process. Following the city’s handover to China, under a policy of “Macau People Ruling Macau,” the newly formed government administration was headed by a locally born Chinese Chief Executive Officer, a position which replaced the Portugal-appointed Governor. In an effort to stimulate the economy, the new administration decided to end the monopoly arrangement and liberalize the gaming industry by inviting participation in the market from foreign gaming companies. Macau’s decision to adopt an entrepreneurial approach to urban management and govern with a market rationale entails a neoliberal restructuring of the local postcolonial economy (Harvey, 1989), and these policies seem consistent with other such neoliberal reforms sweeping across a variety of East and Southeast Asian locales.

Aihwa Ong’s (2006) innovative and influential theory of “neoliberalism as exception” describes the East Asian variety of neoliberalism as a mobile toolkit of pragmatic, problem-solving operations, which planners may selectively and opportunistically deploy across the region. “The neoliberal as a mobile technology can be taken up by a government or any other institution to recast problems as non-ideological and non-political issues that need technical solutions to maximize intended outcomes,” she says (Ong, 2011: 4). Ong’s theory is therefore useful for understanding contemporary governance strategies and spatial planning in Macau, and the relation of each to the city’s economic growth. However, close attention to Macau governance reveals inherent ironies and limitations of Ong’s theoretical model. In this analysis of post-handover governance in Macau, I seek to both understand the specific role of planning in Macau’s casino economy and its potential generalizability in the region, and to refine Ong’s theory of neoliberalism by grounding it in a spatially informed approach. A spatial history of Macau’s casino liberalization, and a concomitant genealogy of the post-socialist consumer subject that has emerged from this process and currently drives industry development, demonstrates the radical specificity of the Macau example, and therefore the difficulty of replicating the Macau system in other regional locales.

In addition, this extended case study of Macau’s spatial transformation also addresses a significant aporia in the field of planning. Ananya Roy (2009) contends that “a vast swath of planning theory is simply not concerned with space as materiality” (p. 9); therefore, Macau’s material spatial disposition provides a potent exemplar not only for regional states eager to embrace casino development, but also for planning theorists and practitioners as well.

Neoliberal exceptions in Macau

The various governmental strategies enabling Macau’s postcolonial development may be generally understood within the rubric of Ong’s conception of “neoliberalism as exception.” Informed by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Carl Schmitt, Ong has produced an undeniably important and influential body of scholarship that attempts to theorize neoliberalism in Asia, not as a totalizing ideological or economic system, but as a mobile and migratory set of governmental interventions. For Ong (2011), neoliberal “spatializing practices” function to

form the urban as a problem-space in which a cast of disparate actors—the state, capitalists, NGOs, foreign experts, and ordinary people—define what is problematic, uncertain, or in need of mediation, and then go about solving these now-identified problems such as urban planning, class politics, and human capital. (p. 10)

These spatializing practices are selectively applied by “post-developmental” Asian states to specific territories and populations, based on a market logic, in order to enhance development, growth, and accumulation. Such states problematize and multiply sovereignty by subdividing national territories into Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and other locales of juridical exceptionalism, with favorable tax regimes or relaxed labor regulations aiming to attract international investment; and they use “graduated” or calibrated strategies to disarticulate the traditional components of sovereignty and citizenship in order that they may be bundled and rearticulated to the trajectories of global capitalism.

As a Chinese Special Administrative Region (SAR), Macau has an autonomous government administration, Portuguese legal system, and distinct currency and monetary policy, which function to differentiate the peninsular city-state from the adjacent mainland and from the Hong Kong SAR. The SAR designation China has applied to these erstwhile territories may be understood as an example of what Ong refers to as a “zoning technology,” a “distinctive reterritorialization of the national space” (p. 99), which allows these former colonial concessions to continue to operate their market economies within the rubric of China’s “one country, two systems” regime, while functioning within a Chinese “axis” (p. 115) that also includes Singapore and Taiwan. In addition, as the only site of legal casino gaming in the PRC, it would seem that Macau’s juridical status may be understood through the logic of Schmitt’s “state of exception,” which is a key component of Ong’s theoretical arsenal.¹ “The political exception is increasingly deployed by many Asian states … to create regulation spaces of political economic experimentation,” contends Ong (p. 98). Macau benefits from such neoliberal exceptions.

Ong’s ethnographically informed “midrange theorizing” (p. 13) based in her fieldwork across several Asian locales is certainly enlightening; however, my own study of the Macau gaming industry over the past decade suggests some limitations to her argument when applied wholesale in the Macau context. Observing that “neoliberalism’s metaphor is knowledge,” Ong (2007) envisions neoliberalism as a governmental technique to manage populations with the aim of “production of educated subjects” (p. 5), who can compete in a global marketplace. For example, she describes Malaysia’s use of preferential pastoral programs to educate an ethnic Malay professional class, as well as attempts by transnational companies to “reengineer the Chinese soul” in Shanghai in an effort to create managerial corporate subjects for the benefit of the global economy. While Ong (2006) writes of assemblages of migratory practices that produce “mutating configurations of possibility” (p. 4), her vocabulary reveals implicit assumptions about the causality of those mutations. Her discourse is peppered with numerous references to “logics,” “optimizing rationality,” “calibration,” “calculation,” “re-engineering,” “techno-optimization,” and other similar terms that comprise an epistemology of governance, and of the “educated” neoliberal subject which is its object. Admittedly, Ong’s focus on a technocratic governmental rationality, aligned with a future-oriented temporality and market-driven orientation, is largely what makes her writing so provocative. But these terms easily merge into a broader contemporary discursive formation, which problematically ascribes scientific, transcendental, and teleological valences to the market.

I argue that in the case of Macau’s casino gaming liberalization and economic development, Ong’s tendency to privilege an epistemology of governance obscures the importance of ontological concerns that underlie (and motivate) this process. This limitation of her approach is again highlighted by attention to her language. Like many structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers (with the instructive exception of Foucault),² Ong tends to use spatial figures and metaphors, but she does not analyze actual spaces. One needs to only turn to the table of contents page of Neoliberalism as Exception to find that that the book includes sections dedicated to “Spaces of Governing,” “Circuits of Expertise,” and “The Edge of Emergence,” as well chapter titles which mention “zoning technologies,” “biocartography,” and “latitudes” which “stretch the bounds” of governmentality. This is certainly a spatially informed vocabulary, but none of these suggestive metaphors leads to concrete spatial analysis. I argue that such spatial analysis is crucial to understanding Macau’s post-liberalization development. Therefore, my goal is to conduct a Foucaultian spatial history of the important temporal moment of Macau’s postcolonial transition and casino liberalization process. I believe this spatial ontology, which Stuart Elden (2001) calls “mapping the present,” is more illuminating in the Macau case than Ong’s technocratic epistemology of governance. In fact, I will demonstrate that adopting an ontological approach to examine Macau necessitates inverting, subverting, or reinterpreting a number of Ong’s key theoretical concepts.

By taking seriously Ong’s own analytics of assemblage over structure, I critically engage with her approach to explore the manner in which Macau’s gaming revenue boom was not so much authored by a coherent set of technocratic governmental policies, as it was enacted or enunciated by a variety of unmotivated relations among specific policies, bodies, and elements of the built environment, which were brought together often without specific intention (or with different intentions). From this perspective, such neoliberal interventions are less carefully calculated rationalities, and more, in the worlds of Nikolas Rose (1999):

contingent lash-ups of thought and action in which various problems of governing were resolved through drawing upon instruments and procedures that happened to be available, in which new ways of governing were invented in a rather ad hoc way, as practical attempts to think about and act upon specific problems in particular locales, and various other existing techniques and practices were merely dressed up in new clothes. (p. 27)

Indeed, this approach to neoliberalism is consistent with a more general tendency in traditional Chinese thought (and contemporary post-structural theory) to understand present conditions not in terms of temporal calculation and consequence, or cause and effect, but of situational disposition or propensity (Easterling, 2013; Jullien, 1995; Keith et al., 2014: 92–94). Disposition is captured in Foucault’s notion of the dispositif, or apparatus, which locates a nascent positivity or potential in a configuration of diverse factors (Hillier and Cao, 2011; Ploger, 2008). From this perspective, I trace the spatial ontology of Macau’s post-liberalization economic expansion rather than its epistemology, and the concomitant emergence in Macau of a post-socialist Chinese tourist subject, who has been crucial to the success of this venture. Macau may be understood as a laboratory for experimenting with new forms of Chinese subjectivity.

The body of this article is divided into three sections. The first section explores a genealogy of the post-socialist Chinese subject in the urban laboratory of Macau. The second section is an analysis of the way this genealogy is in some ways informed by ancient aspects of Macau’s disposition, rather than new neoliberal calculations. The third section is an account of some actual contemporary governmental interventions but demonstrates that responses to three governance crises, rather than a comprehensive technocratic plan, led to Macau’s economic transformation. In the conclusion, I use the Macau case to reflect on Ong’s theory of neoliberalism, as well as the relevance these issues have for regional planning of casino urbanism.

Macau as an urban “laboratory of consumption”

One clear benefit of Ong’s language in the context of the Macau SAR is the manner in which it allows us to understand the urban environment as an experimental “laboratory” (Ong, 2007: 110) for testing governmental interventions. However, investigation of the establishment and operations of this laboratory reveals that Macau’s metropolitan laboratory departs in some ways from Ong’s model. Ong has tended to examine exceptional spaces of production, such as SEZs where commodities are manufactured for export, or globalized sites of knowledge production and transfer. Macau, in contrast, is an exceptional space of consumption, where nothing tangible is really produced. As James Sidaway (2007) has noted, “Ong’s focus on production also leaves those enclave spaces oriented towards consumption (such as enclaved tourist resorts) largely outside her vision” (p. 334). The significance of this difference is evident when we contrast the Macau SAR with the Chinese SEZs on which Ong focuses. Consistent with her epistemology of neoliberalism driven by the problematic of “how to administer people for self-mastery” (Ong, 2007: 4), Ong demonstrates how the SEZs become a locus of attraction for elite “highly-educated populations” of Chinese workers.

However, the specifically pedagogical dimension of neoliberalism in Macau³—Ong’s “production of educated subjects”—involves Chinese tourists to the SAR rather than Chinese workers. Apart from its ostensible definition as a casino tourism destination, we may understand Macau today as an experimental laboratory of mobility and consumption practices through which Chinese tourists are mobilized in a didactic project of biopolitical governmentality that is designed to enhance the macroeconomic strategies of the PRC (Simpson, 2014). What is produced in Macau’s leisure gaming industry is the Chinese consumer subject.⁴ The PRC has commenced a massive project that aims to displace and rapidly urbanize a substantial component of China’s rural population in an effort to create a domestic consumer economy. The hope is that the residential and lifestyle purchasing decisions of this population will sustain China’s economy by weaning the nation off its reliance on an SEZ-led production-for-export regime which lacks long-term sustainability. While we will see later that enhancing tourism practices is a strategic component of that process, and one in which I argue Macau has come to play a functional role, Macau’s specific role did not necessarily happen by technocratic design. More importantly, prioritizing consumption in Macau inverts the productivist orientation of Ong’s analysis, much in the same way that genealogy operates against the grain of an historical discourse of cause and effect.

Genealogy of the subject in Macau

Ong’s tendency to use spatial metaphors without analyzing actual spaces is most clearly evident in her analysis of East Asian SEZs. Her epistemological approach leads her to focus on these zones as “governmental technologies,” “regulation spaces of political economic experimentation” (p. 98), rather than actual material geographical and social spaces of governmentality. While she certainly discusses workers and labor conditions in Indonesian and Malaysian SEZs, the spaces themselves are not the focus of her analysis. However, if the aim is to understand spatial ontology, or how spaces create conditions which enable the production of new subjects, it seems necessary to conduct spatial histories or genealogies in the vein of Foucault’s analysis of the clinic or prison. In addition to the importance of analyzing strategies or technologies of governance designed to articulate state spaces with transnational capital, we may note that, in Foucault’s (1986) own words, “Spatial arrangements are also political and economic forms to be studied in detail” (p. 10).

Genealogy is a method for exploring disposition, “the material context of subject production” (Best and Kellner, 1991: 50). The usefulness of this Foucaultian approach to space and subjects in the context of China is clearly illustrated by extant spatially informed studies of the socialist danwei (work unit) and post-socialist factory dormitory in the SEZ. For example, Bray’s (2005) genealogy of the Chinese danwei exposes the complex lineage that enabled the emergence of this spatial form, including Confucian cosmology, ancient Chinese city walls, nationalist worker guilds, and radical Soviet planning discourses. For Bray, the danwei was not simply a residence, work site, or community association, but functioned as a “machine” for production of proletarian subjects appropriate to China’s socialist regime.

China’s post-socialist economic reforms are similarly driven by spatial subjectification. For Pun Ngai (2005), the Chinese state cooperates today with transnational capital in the SEZs to fashion a novel post-socialist gendered laborer. The dagongmei produced in the SEZ “dormitory labor regime” is distinct from the socialist worker, or gongren, forged in the socialist danwei. The danwei was characterized by the state’s lifelong commitment to a collectivist social identity, while the factory dormitory is a subaltern site of transience and relative anonymity. While the effectiveness of the danwei was rooted in provision of a cradle-to-grave social contract, thereby ensuring reproduction of labor power for the socialist economy, the dagongmei “working for the boss” in the SEZ has no such security. A temporary migrant worker who lacks urban hukou registration and attendant social benefits, the dagongmei enjoys no social contract beyond the exploitative terms of the state, patriarchy, and wage labor.

China’s recent decision to foreground consumption in macroeconomic planning similarly entails a project of subjectification that aims to produce post-socialist consumer subjects. The remainder of this article explores the manner in which Macau’s casino liberalization process has positioned the SAR to function in tandem with the SEZ to produce post-socialist consumers for the PRC. This genealogy, or mapping of the Macau present, reveals that what may appear on the surface to be neoliberal rationalities, actually emerge against a backdrop of unplanned contingencies which created the “conditions of possibility” for the consumer subject.⁵

Latent forms of regional government

A genealogy of the post-socialist subject, with specific attention to its spatial ontology, exposes the limitations of Ong’s epistemological account of “neoliberalism as exception.” It does so, in part, by illustrating the tenacity of older governmental and economic forms, much as Bray demonstrates the conservative persistence of ancient Chinese city walls and compound houses in the revolutionary design of the danwei. Therefore, against the grain of Ong’s progressive, “post-developmental” futurism, I first explore how antecedent archaic cultural forms and latent governmental regimes intrude into the Macau present disguised as novel practices. These practices inform Macau’s spatial disposition.⁶

In this section of the article, I will use this exercise in mapping the present to suggest that in the case of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, Ong’s supposedly novel concepts of “space of exception” and “zoning technologies” are actually primitive, preexisting elements of the regional disposition. This demonstrates one manner in which what are purported to be new rationalities of governance may be understood instead as Rose’s “contingent lash-ups of thought and action,” drawing on mechanisms that happened to be available.

Medieval Macau: historical forms disguised as neoliberal interventions

Portuguese explorers founded Macau in 1557 to facilitate Catholic missions into China and trade with the Middle Kingdom. Macau’s economy originally benefitted from the city’s role as a medium of interchange between Europe and the Ming Dynasty, as well as China’s trade with Japan when such relations with the latter were forbidden by imperial edict. Throughout its 500-year history, Macau’s political status has always been ambiguous. Never technically a colony, Macau was jointly governed by both Portugal and China in a tacit partnership that served the interests of both states, each of which used the territory for activities that were inconvenient, immoral, or illegal at home. In her ethnographic study of Macau sovereignty and identity at the time of the handover, Cathryn Clayton (2010) refers to this characteristic as the city’s “sort-of sovereignty.” This ambiguous sovereignty has facilitated and contributed to Macau’s contemporary status and function. This type of shared governance and dual civic loyalty, which was typical of medieval cities, has persisted in Macau, which merges this medieval form with a post-Westphalian governance regime (Henders, 2001).

As the city’s importance to global trade eventually waned, to be displaced by ports in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and as Portuguese global influence and imperial power faded with the successive rise of the Dutch, British, and American empires, Macau survived by exploiting a variety of marginal economic activities. These included not only gambling but opium production, prostitution, and indentured servitude (Asome, 2014). Due to Portugal’s refusal to sign the post-war Bretton Woods agreement which regulated the international sale of gold, Macau became for a time a global hub of the gold trade.⁷ The city was a conduit for smuggling raw materials into the PRC after the socialist revolution, and for otherwise illegal, “bourgeois,” and counter-revolutionary business conducted by Communist Party leaders. Therefore, Macau has long capitalized on its status as a “space of exception,” a designation which actually predates contemporary neoliberal interventions. This characteristic has been central to Macau’s identity since the city’s origins; the recent SAR status merely formalized an archaic quality of the city.

Contemporary Macau: historical forms which inspired neoliberal interventions

To understand Macau today, we must also situate the city spatially within the PRD region of China. This region includes nine prefectures of Guangdong province, as well as the SARs of Hong Kong and Macau, and is home to more than 40 million people. Macau’s recent explosive economic growth emanates not only from the city’s peculiar geo-historical specificity but also from the role that the enclave plays in the PRD megacity, which, along with the Yangtze River Delta and the Silicon Valley-style Zhongguan Cun, is one of three spatial engines of China’s contemporary economic transformation (Arrighi, 2007: 356–357; Ng and Tang, 1999). Clearly exemplifying the interplay of a variety of Ong’s theoretical concepts, the PRD comprises a number of special zones and administrative areas, each of which plays a specific function in the collective economic activity of the area and its articulations with global capitalist networks.

Adjacent to Macau and Hong Kong, respectively, are the SEZs of Zhuhai and Shenzhen, which Deng Xiaoping established in 1979 as key components of China’s economic reforms. Entirely consistent with Ong’s arguments, the SEZs were established as laboratories of capitalism where China could experiment with market reforms, attract foreign direct investment, study Western production and management techniques, and test a private land market (Chuihua et al., 2001; Harvey, 2007: 130; Schoon, 2014). In a work that predates Ong’s book, but with language prescient of her “zoning technologies,” a Harvard Design School research group led by Rem Koolhaas argues that the SEZs are “devices or machines generated by the Chinese government in order to use some of the commercial energies that exist in the immediate vicinity” (Chuihua et al., 2000: 312). However, much as Macau’s dual sovereignty and exceptional legal status predate contemporary neoliberal interventions, this team suggests that the PRD “has always been an experimental zone where foreign capital could be received as though in a laboratory” (p. 312). Indeed, implicitly inverting Ong’s assumptions about the novel exceptional rationalities of zoning technologies, they claim that Macau’s and Hong Kong’s status as foreign colonial enclaves was actually the inspiration for the creation of the SEZs. “Following the precedent of establishing Hong Kong and Macao as concessions for trade with foreigners,” they argue, “the Party chose to adopt the enclave model for these new socialist market experiments, designating select regions in the Pearl River Delta as Special Economic Zones” (p. 85).

This status informs the manner in which Macau today functions as a “laboratory of consumption” and counterpart to enclaves of production, where nascent Chinese urbanites and novice tourists travel to engage in intensified and spectacular forms of consumption in a highly concentrated and densely populated urban enclosure. The various enclaves and special zones of the PRD today opportunistically exploit and capitalize off the “flukes, accidents, and imperfections” (Chuihua et al., 2000: 332) that define its uniqueness. Ultimately Macau’s ambiguous sovereignty is as much an advantageous historical “fluke” as it is a result of Chinese zoning technologies, and demonstrates that Macau has long been adept at turning its “imperfections” to its advantage. This observation is not meant to deny Ong’s argument, but rather to expand our understanding of neoliberalism as exception, and to highlight the manner in which antecedent historical qualities of the territory animate contemporary strategic interventions. As Alsayyad and Roy (2006) trenchantly observe in their exploration of medieval forms which appear in modern urban space and governance, like the gated community or squatter settlement,

What persists in the analysis of neo-liberalism … is a sense of newness: of a new mode of production, of a new production of space, of new forms of discipline and control. Our use of the “medieval” is meant to call into question this teleology … (p. 16)⁸

Much in the same way, my attention to this disposition is meant to moderate Ong’s focus on novel neoliberal technologies of governance.

Three governance crises and the “conditions of possibility” for Macau’s biopolitical function

However, aside from these latent forms of governance, this mapping of the present also identifies novel governmental policies authored by both Macau and PRC officials that are important to Macau’s current development. These are examples of the types of political strategies analyzed by Ong, but the precise operations of such strategies only become clear in the context of a spatial analysis. Therefore, in this section, I follow the example provided by Margo Huxley (2006) in her spatial history of 19th-century urban governance to apply two complementary dimensions of Foucault’s concept of governmentality to Macau: “histories of ‘mentalities’ or rationalities of government,” on one hand, and “how space and environment are put to work in such rationalities,” on the other hand (p. 771). The governmental interventions that interest me here are those that engineer space and deploy tourist mobilities to inform and facilitate Macau’s role as a biopolitical “laboratory of consumption.”

We may delineate three distinct governmental rationalities at work in Macau’s development that together enabled its transformative tourist function: dispositional, vitalist, and generative rationalities. These three rationalities conspired to produce the post-socialist Chinese subject. This analysis is consistent with Foucault’s spatial histories which “examine in historical detail, the ways in which organization of spaces have acted as technologies of government in attempts to produce and regulate particular behaviors and subjectivities” (Huxley, 2006: 772). These are not the forward-looking neoliberal calculations discussed by Ong. Rather, each governmental strategy was enacted to address a particular socio-economic crisis involving, respectively, finance, law and order, and public health. Specifically, (1) the Macau government deployed a dispositional strategy (Huxley, 2006: 774) to address the city’s law-and-order problems revolving around the role of Chinese organized crime in the city’s well-publicized “casino wars” that occurred in the late 1990s; (2) China’s central government used vitalist strategic population measures (Huxley, 2006: 780) to confront the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, which threatened the success of the country’s emerging market economy by illustrating its reliance on vulnerable neighboring currencies; and (3) Chinese officials used a generative strategy (Huxley, 2006: 777) to address the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome epidemic that struck Hong Kong, Macau, and the mainland in 2003, and threatened to undermine the viability of the emerging PRD and its role in China’s market economy.⁹ These strategies functioned to create a postcolonial “governable space” (Rose, 1999) in Macau. This space simultaneously became effectively manageable by the new post-handover local government, suitable for the Chinese central government to send nascent mainland tourists, and amenable to the interests of transnational capital. The strategies which realized this outcome appear more reactive than proactive; each was an attempt to mitigate an unforeseen contingency, as opposed to a progressive and “optimizing” rationality. These three governance crises together created a generalized “state of emergency” (rather than Ong’s liminal Schmittian exception) that was resolved with population-oriented solutions that involved the engineering of social space. Together they comprised the “conditions of possibility” for Macau’s current consumer function.

Macau’s casino wars: dispositional governance and the spatial production of the integrated resort

In the 1980s, casino monopoly holder Ho began sub-contracting private VIP rooms in his casinos to agents who would attract high-rollers from the region, bring them to Macau to gamble, and advance them credit for gambling stakes. These quasi-institutional loan sharks are necessary to the local industry because of the tight regulation of currency movements out of the PRC. Chinese nationals who wish to wager high stakes in Macau casinos rely on local loans. Since gambling debts are not legally enforceable on the mainland, money lenders must be confident of their ability to extract repayment of debts via extra-legal means. For this reason, Chinese organized crime groups were able to establish relationships with the casinos via direct or indirect management of these private gaming rooms.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, in the years leading up to the handover of the colony to the PRC, Macau was rocked by increasingly violent fighting between rival triad groups who sought to claim their shares of proceeds from loan sharking, extortion, smuggling, drugs, prostitution, and other vice-related industries before the Chinese authorities took over. By 1998, the violence had seemingly spun out of control. The international media regularly reported sensational stories of arson, bombings of motorcycles and cars (including a car belonging to the Chief of Police), shootouts between rival gang members, and targeted assassinations of government officials and gaming industry regulators. The weak Portuguese administration proved powerless to stop the violence or punish perpetrators. The 14K Triad gang leader “Broken Tooth” Koi, Macau’s most well-known crime figure, even financed a gritty autobiographical film about his rise to power in the Macau underworld. The perceived lack of public order proved detrimental to Macau’s tourism and gaming industry, and damaged the city’s international image.

The PRC hoped to restore order in the colony prior to gaining administrative control over it in 1999, and local government officials decided to liberalize the gaming monopoly and invite the participation of foreign operators in the industry. They hoped that this would help maintain law and order and strengthen the legitimacy of Macau’s postcolonial administration (Lo, 2005). Since operators in gaming jurisdictions in North American and Australia are bound to abide by the legal regulations of those home jurisdictions even when operating casinos abroad, it was hoped that those foreign legal regimes would function to constrain and police local activities (see Cormier and Faiss, 1988).

The government launched a public bidding process, and in 2002 Macau granted three casino concessions to replace the former monopoly agreement: one concession went to SJM, a company owned by previous monopoly holder Ho; one to Galaxy Entertainment, a newly formed company controlled by Hong Kong property tycoon Liu Che Woo; and the other to Wynn Resorts, owned by Las Vegas luxury integrated resort developer Steve Wynn.¹⁰

However, the Gaming Tender Committee was also impressed by the initial proposal of Las Vegas developer Sheldon Adelson and his vision to build a massive Venetian resort that would anchor a “Cotai Strip” of properties to be located in Macau’s new Cotai land reclamation site, which was awaiting development near the newly constructed airport. But Adelson launched his bid for a license as a joint venture with Taiwan’s China Development Industrial Band, whose chairman was the chief finance officer of the Kuomintang Party (KMT; Cohen, 2014). The KMT had been banned from Macau since the eruption of Maoist civil unrest in the city during China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s (Dicks, 1984), and given political sensitivities had little hope of actually securing a license. The partnership only served to underscore Adelson’s inexperience in regional politics.

The members of the Tender Committee suggested that Las Vegas Sands instead enter into a partnership with Galaxy Entertainment so that Adelson could benefit from that company’s successful bid for a Macau gaming license. The partnership was forged and the joint application was approved. However, the partnership quickly proved untenable due to conflicts between the companies, and concern that Galaxy’s business operations would not pass favorable scrutiny from gaming officials in Las Vegas. The government ultimately allowed the companies to divide the joint venture into two separate entities: one concession and one so-called “sub-concession,” each of which shared the same license.

The other two Macau concessionaires protested this favorable arrangement, and the government had little choice but to allow those concessionaires to also award sub-concessions of their respective licenses; in this way the three original concessions were doubled. Wynn profited US$900 million by selling his sub-concession to Melco-PBL, a partnership between Ho’s son Lawrence Ho and Australian gaming and publishing tycoon Kerry Packer, while Ho sold his own sub-concession for US$200 million to MGM China Holdings Ltd., jointly owned by MGM Resorts International and Ho’s daughter, Pansy Ho.

The decision to introduce market competition into the monopoly arrangement and attract outside investment was certainly a neoliberal intervention, not only according to Ong’s specific formulation but even in the conventional understanding of the term. But the execution of this intervention arguably did not entail an “optimizing rationality.” Rather, the Macau government lost US$1.1 billion in direct revenue for the sale of the sub-concessions, which was pocketed by Wynn and Ho. The ostensible effort to dismantle Ho’s monopoly in order to promote development ultimately led to members of his immediate family controlling, either fully or partially, three of Macau’s six new gaming concessions. Finally, the decision to award a concession to Galaxy, a company with no experience in the gaming industry, while rejecting proposals from experienced Las Vegas operators such as Park Place Entertainment and Mandalay Bay, led to suspicions among some industry insiders of corruption in the bidding process. In fact, Macau’s Minister of Public Works was eventually prosecuted and jailed in the largest corruption scandal in the city’s history for accepting US$100 million in kickbacks for approving post-handover construction projects.

Liberalization (accompanied by the implicit threat of possible security measures enacted by the mainland government) helped rid Macau of the violent crime that plagued the city, but not of Chinese triads. Indeed, by working with “junket” operators who fund high stakes VIP gambling, organized crime figures ironically play a crucial role in the gaming industry (Lo and Kwok, 2016). The Macau government’s collusion with an oligarchy of casino concessionaires, foreign gaming regulators, and organized crime to administer the city may be understood as an example of what Ong (2000) refers to as a “state-transnational network whereby some aspects of state power and authority are taken up by foreign corporations located in special economic zones” or outside the territory (p. 57). However, the tacit integration of illegal and legal activities, and purposeful involvement of criminal agents within a government partnership that functions in the liminal zone “between law and regulation” (Eadington and Siu, 2007), makes it distinct from the networks on which she builds her theory.¹¹ Furthermore, to return once again to antecedent conditions of possibility, from an historical perspective this particular “state-transnational” network between government officials, gangsters, and gaming operators is not really a novel arrangement. Rather, it involves the persistence of not only a medieval mode of governance but also a tribute–trade relationship that has endured in East Asia for half a millennium (Arrighi, 2003; Hamashita, 2008).

One material and spatial consequence of this process was the appearance of the integrated resort in Macau, a spatial technology of accumulation whose development in Las Vegas is largely attributed to Wynn and Adelson (Cohen, 2016b), and which contrasted dramatically with Macau’s pre-handover casinos. The casinos of Macau’s monopoly phase were primarily small, dark, unornamented, and smoke-filled basement rooms in hotels which lacked the glamor of Las Vegas. In casino design parlance, such functional gambling structures follow the influential design approach of Bill Friedman (2000), limiting frills so as not to distract players from the principle activity of gambling.¹² The seedy ambiance of these casino spaces reflected the social disorder produced by the monopoly arrangement.

The new foreign concessionaires brought a professional management regime and constructed large and open mega-resorts that imitated the “Las Vegas style.” This approach deploys the strategy of designer David Kranes (1995), aiming to promote gaming as a leisure activity, to construct resorts which engage visitors’ sense of curiosity, exploration, and freedom, and to make them feel safe and secure. The Sands Macau, opened by Adelson in 2004, was the first such project. The largest casino in the world at the time it was built, the Sands’ enormous, brightly illuminated gaming floor was designed by noted casino architect Paul Steelman for maximum visibility. The Sands’ stadium-style design allows the entire main floor to be observed from the open floors that circle above it.

The design of Macau’s new integrated resorts such as Venetian, Sands-Cotai, Wynn, City of Dreams, Galaxy, and MGM promotes panopticism, transparency, controlled access, and privatized, pseudo-public space. With a focus on the significance of this design, we can observe that the Macau government’s decision to effectively share governance of the territory with the foreign casino concessionaires and to initiate construction of this new type of casino environment is not only an example of Ong’s “state-transnational network,” but entails what Huxley (2007) calls a dispositional strategy of governance, that aims to coordinate and deploy the spatial environment itself as a mode of governance. “In projects of political subjectification or governmental self-formation,” says Huxley (2007), “appropriate bodily comportments and forms of subjectivity are to be fostered through the positive, catalytic qualities of spaces, places, and environments.” This can be understood as the spatial production of the urban environment whereby the impending threat of violence and urban disorder is eradicated, to be replaced by a spatial diagram of order and visibility designed to transform urban life and urban subjects.

The Sands role in Macau, and especially the way in which it came to serve as a conduit for circulations of Chinese tourists, exemplifies Foucault’s concept of architecture as techne, and demonstrates how modern architecture moves beyond purely symbolic aspirations and “begins to concern itself closely with problems of population, health and urbanism” (Foucault, 1986: 9). These relations become evident in analysis of the ensuing crises of finance and public health which prompted governmental responses from China and Macau. These crises are explored in the next two sections.

The Asian financial crisis: vitalist governance and production of the Chinese tourist subject

The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which started in Thailand but quickly swept across the continent, raised concerns within China about the country’s nascent capitalist economy. Among other outcomes, the crisis markedly decreased the gross domestic product (GDP) of a number of countries in the region, as well as devaluing many Asian currencies. The crisis therefore constrained the capacity for neighboring countries, particularly Japan, South Korea, and Thailand, to purchase Chinese exports. To address the financial crisis, the Chinese central government sought to enhance domestic consumption levels in order to decrease the country’s reliance on external markets to purchase the goods manufactured in the country. In order to achieve this goal, the central government sought to make tourism a key growth area of the economy, hoping to mobilize the Chinese population in tourist practices that would lead to enhanced consumption. Inverting decades of rhetoric that characterized tourism as bourgeois decadence, and policies which discouraged or prevented population mobility, the government formalized the overt practice of “leisure” by creating three week-long, annual public holiday periods, or “Golden Weeks,” to encourage domestic and cross-border tourism. Drawing on China’s ancient tradition of literati travel, authorities launched an extensive information campaign designed to inform citizens of the moral value of travel, and the behaviors proper to modern tourism. Therefore, this formalized leisure was not simply a respite from labor but became another productive component of working life.

Alongside its economic benefits, the Chinese government sees tourism as “an inexpensive substitute for education,” says Nyiri (2009: 154), a pedagogical or civilizing practice that helps create “quality” citizens. Chinese tourism “mobility serves a function of embourgeoisement” (Nyiri, 2009: 157). The intended links between Chinese tourism mobilities and civilizing education mirrors the Maoist practice of sending urbanites to the countryside for re-education. If this earlier form of socialist mobility was meant to forge socialist revolutionaries, Chinese tourism today involves a practice of subjection that produces a refined and productive consumer, who in turn helps develop the national economy. “Tourism is an arena in which the production of cultural discourse penetrates everyday consumption, one in which Chinese subjects self-consciously consume complex representations of culture and respond to them in quotidian activities,” contends Nyiri (2006). “As such, it is a key sphere in which the reinvention of the Chinese subject takes place” (p. 97).

This use of human mobility as a governmental technique is an example of what Huxley (2007) has described as a vitalist strategy of governance, a spatial strategy which involves “the making up of ‘the social’ as an object of governmental problemization” (p. 198). That newly enhanced social sphere and its tourism practices would become important to economic development, which benefitted Macau. As a self-contained leisure site with direct proximity to the mainland, yet whose Portuguese history, foodways, and architectural heritage made it experientially distinct from other parts of China, Macau was a natural destination for nascent tourists. At the same time, the fact that more than half of Macau’s population was either a first- or second-generation immigrant from mainland China made it an accessible and legible site for novice travelers, as well as a site that PRC authorities deemed politically safe for Chinese nationals to visit. But due to China’s own population management, the overwhelming majority of such potential Chinese tourists had no recourse to legally sanctioned cross-border travel. However, another unexpected crisis prompted changes in China’s visa regime.

The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome epidemic: generative governance and productive population mobility

The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in southern China during the spring of 2002 constituted a profound public health crisis that presented another set of governance challenges. While the scale of the epidemic on the mainland was largely hidden by the central government, the effect on Hong Kong and Macau was immediately visible. The outbreak had devastating consequences for the Hong Kong economy. The World Health Organization cautioned against traveling to Hong Kong, releasing the most strict travel advisory in the institution’s history. Between March and June 2002, nearly 4000 Hong Kong businesses closed. The tourism industry suffered dramatically. At the height of the crisis in April and May of that year, hotel occupancy dropped by 20%, and the average daily number of passengers on Hong Kong’s flagship Cathay Pacific airlines decreased by nearly 90% in April (Baehr, 2008). However, the epidemic not only led to a reduction of tourist visitors to Hong Kong; much of the initial global spread of the disease was attributed to a specific group of tourists who visited Hong Kong and stayed on the same floor of a particular hotel, subsequently spreading the disease to seven other global sites (Ng, 2008). Therefore, the crisis, and its locus in Hong Kong, served to seriously undermine the development of China’s tourism industry.

The dire economic effects, combined with the daily psychological trauma of living in a toxic environment, characterized by a mysterious but potentially fatal illness, transformed quotidian life in both cities. In addition, however, the syndrome demonstrated the permeability of the border, and reinterpreted the border itself as a biopolitical technology of contagion and hygiene.

In the immediate wake of the crisis, Hong Kong citizens staged the largest demonstration in the city’s history—not only to emphasize their dissatisfaction with the handling of the epidemic and subsequent declining real estate value in the city but also to protest the central government’s plans to introduce harsh security measures to the city. Less than 1 month later, the PRC announced a Closer Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) with Hong Kong and Macau that aimed to stimulate the cities’ respective economies and to address public discontent. One specific component of the CEPA was the launching of the Individual Visit Scheme (IVS) which allowed select tourists from particular cities and provinces to travel to Hong Kong and Macau on individual visas, without joining a government-sanctioned group tour. The IVS would lead to a veritable explosion in the number of Chinese tourists visiting the SARs.

The IVS can be understood as one of Ong’s neoliberal technologies of governance, an example of what she calls “graduated sovereignty” (Ong, 2000): graduated sovereignty involves “differential state treatment of segments of the population in relation to market calculations.” The term refers to

the effects of a flexible management of sovereignty, as governments adjust political space to the dictates of global capital, giving corporations an indirect power over the political conditions of citizens in zones that are differently articulated to global production and financial circuits. (Ong, 2000: 78)

However, in the case of Macau it is capital and tourists (and workers to serve these tourists) that are distributed into the zone. In this regard, the graduated sovereignty at work in relation to Macau does not involve the differential treatment of segments of the Macau population. Rather, the PRC central government uses exit-visa restrictions to allow residents from certain relatively more affluent locales advantaged access to Macau. This may be understood as an example of “governmobility” (Baerenholdt, 2013), or the use of mobility as a mode of governance. In this case, the central government grants carefully calibrated freedoms of movement to select Chinese nationals in an effort to cultivate in them the capacity for self-government. Initially this scheme applied only to residents of Beijing and Shanghai and eight cities of Guangdong province. Today it has been expanded to include residents of 49 Chinese cities. The IVS controls the number of trips these Chinese citizens may make to Macau in a year, the length of time they must wait between trips, and the duration of their visits. In 2012, 7.1 million tourists from the mainland visited Macau under the IVS. The IVS is what Huxley (2007) calls a generative rationality of governance that aims to use selective population mobility and cross-border circulation to produce both bodily and moral states of health (see also Bray, 2008). Therefore as a tourist enclave, as opposed to an SEZ, Macau today serves as an inverted zone, where what is managed is people moving in rather than products moving out.

The confluence, in the PRD context, of the vitalist governmentality of the social sphere, the generative tourist circulations promoted by the IVS, and the dispositional spatial organization of the city’s casinos, enabled Macau’s tourist numbers to increase exponentially: from 11 million in 2002, to 21 million in 2009, to 31 million in 2014. Those tourists, in turn, generate Macau’s remarkable gaming revenues. Much like the Chinese SEZ capitalizes off an indigenous dormitory-produced dagongmei subject, Macau’s economic growth results from the city’s ability to derive accumulation from the very post-socialist tourist consumers that are forged in its integrated resorts.

This mapping of the Macau present reveals how these three moments realized a latent potential or “generative capacity” (Farias, 2010: 7) of Macau’s spatial disposition, the “futures present” in the city (Keith et al., 2014: 74). This process in Macau relies on a complex “concrescence” (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 27) of a variety of (originally unrelated) trans-local enactments that together normalize Chinese consumption; these include informal planning, transnational financial flows, North American casino resort design, normative tourist mobilities, didactic post-socialist policies, the moral transfiguration of Chinese leisure, biological and sociological contagions, and Macau’s own peculiar juridical status.

Conclusion: neoliberal exceptions?

Ong’s attention to neoliberal exceptions, technologies, and networks is certainly helpful in understanding Macau’s development as an exceptional zone, with a contemporary metropolitan character which is in many ways an homage to her theoretical innovations. But this spatial history of the Macau gaming industry liberalization and the genealogy of the post-socialist subject in Macau reveals that the city benefitted not so much from a carefully calculated strategic optimization of neoliberal technologies, as from a series of unrelated and reactive responses, authored by different governmental authorities, and across several different scales, to a variety of unexpected crises. In the process, authorities made fortuitous use of preexisting governance techniques which were latent in the city’s disposition. Each of these strategies took a spatial form and attempted to realize Macau as a “governable space.”

We have seen that attention to Macau as a space of consumption, rather than production, serves to invert, subvert, or reimagine many of Ong’s other concepts. Her avant-garde zoning technologies and experimental laboratories are exposed as antecedent historical forms which are revived in the present. “Graduated sovereignty” becomes a practice by which the mainland government selectively segments tourists entering Macau, rather than a local strategy of population differentiation and pastoral development. Macau’s state-transnational network, whereby the city-state cooperates with global capital and organized crime, differs markedly from those described by Ong. Even neoliberal production of educated subjects takes a unique form in Macau, a pedagogy of tourists rather than workers. Therefore, where Ong focuses on the epistemology of “reengineering the Chinese soul” in Shanghai, this spatial ontology highlights the crucial importance in Macau of the comportment of the Chinese tourist body.

Finally, the Macau case poses a challenge to the strategy of the political “exception,” which is central to Ong’s account of neoliberalism. China’s development of the SEZs as laboratories of production no doubt deployed Ong’s optimizing rationalities to exploit a self-imposed Schmittian legal exception, in the process producing the dangongmei subject who was crucial to the success of the experiment. However, Macau’s emergence as a complementary laboratory of consumption was essentially an unmotivated outcome of the reactive decisions discussed above. Indeed, understood within the context of a political economy that views neoliberalism as a product of a post-1970 “crisis state” of capitalism (Hardt, 2005), we may see Macau as less a strategic epistemological Schmittian exception, and more revealing of the ontological spirit animating Walter Benjamin’s (2006) famous rejoinder to Schmitt, which Benjamin authored at the start of the Second World War: “… the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (p. 392).

In short, the ontology of the Macau present, and the genealogy of the post-socialist consumer, demonstrates how seemingly avant-garde Asian governmental rationalities may be exposed as contemporary iterations of geriatric cultural or economic forms, and opportunistic “contingent lash-ups” of available strategies.

Planning for casino urbanism

As I mentioned at the outset of the article, Macau’s rapid economic growth has stimulated the interest of a variety of states in the region which seek to emulate the Macau model. Each of these regional projects hopes to attract the very Chinese tourists who drive Macau’s development; many have therefore mobilized specialists with experience in Macau, and proceeded to plan and implement projects of replication. But regardless of Ong’s description of neoliberalism as a mobile technology, the foregoing analysis suggests that there is no clear set of “spatializing practices,” which may be easily abstracted from the Macau case and adapted to a new locale.

A case in point is revealed if we track both the career trajectory of Mark Brown, the first CEO of Las Vegas Sands in Macau, and the complementary regional migration of the integrated resort as a spatial form. Brown was responsible for constructing the Sands property, which became the world’s most profitable casino, as well as the Venetian Macau, the largest integrated resort on the planet. He was later hired as COO of NagaWorld, a Macau-style integrated resort project in Phnom Penh, Cambodia which opened in 2005; and he is currently CEO of a US$7 billion casino resort project in Saipan.¹³ The Hong Kong parent company of the Saipan project is controlled by an investor with familial links to a Macau VIP junket company. Steelman, the architect of the Sands and of a new retail component of NagaWorld, is also designing one casino hotel in the Saipan project. The spatial design of the entire multi-property venture planned in Saipan is directly modeled on Macau’s Cotai Strip.

At first glance Saipan has cosmetic geographical and political similarities to Macau: an island territory, a small local population, an ambiguous and exceptional sovereignty, and governmental and territorial oversight by a much more prominent (de-facto) federalist state. These similarities may drive planning assumptions about the viability of replicating Macau in the territory. At the same time, however, as a commonwealth territory of the United States, the gaming regulations, corporate compliance requirements, and general financial oversight of Saipan is markedly different from that which exists in Macau. It would seemingly be difficult to mimic Macau’s specific form of state-transnational network, as well as the management of Macau’s junket financing in Saipan (though this is indeed the current plan).

Saipan offers visa free entry status to mainland Chinese, which is an advantage it has over Macau for attracting such tourists; this policy of inverted “graduated sovereignty” is the sort of optimizing governmental strategy described by Ong. Saipan may certainly prove successful, but one lesson from the spatial history of Macau’s gaming liberalization is that the city’s success has been built on selective mobilization of antecedent dispositions, opportunistic exploitations of flukes and accidents, and reflexive reactions to emergent crises, much more so than it has resulted from replicable neoliberal interventions in governance and planning.

If actually existing neoliberal planning is better understood as “contingent lash-ups of thought and action,” rather than as a rational toolkit of optimizing operations, then what lesson may planners draw from the Macau case? The key tutelage is the strategic exploitation of indigenous spatial disposition, the “specific forms of accumulation” (Foucault, 1972: 125) that characterize a space. As Hillier and Cao (2011) note in their own discussion of the role of disposition in Chinese philosophy and planning theory, “Strategies should develop in relation to the elements (actants) involved and their implied potential, rather than as ‘copy-pastes’ of ‘best practice’” (p. 370). The integrated resort was successful in Macau, not simply because it is an ideal generic form with universal applicability, but because it functioned as part of a dispositional spatial strategy which helped manage fallout from the city’s casino wars, and ultimately served to subject a post-socialist Chinese tourist appropriate to the economic development strategies of the PRC.¹⁴ Careful study of Saipan and other such sites may reveal inherent propensities and latent governmental regimes, which may likewise be mobilized in pursuit of indigenous planning strategies.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was generously supported by a grant from the University of Macau Research Committee (MYRG2016-00113-FSS).

Notes

Author biography

Tim Simpson is associate professor of Communication, and associate dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau, where he has worked since 2001. He is the co-author (with photographer Roger Palmer) of Macao Macau (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015).

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