SNA (Tokyo) — Macau Chief Executive Ho Iat Seng is making it increasingly clear that the territory he administers no longer sees the gambling industry as the key to its future development.

Ho, who assumed Macau’s top administrative post in December 2019–just as the Covid pandemic was launching–has gradually been shifting his rhetoric about the territory’s giant casino operators.

In his first annual policy address in early 2020, Ho said his aim was about “enhancing assistance to the gaming industry,” but in his most recent address delivered last week, he emphasized the “development of non-gaming elements” of Macau’s entertainment industries.

In many other ways as well, the administration in Macau has been signaling its turn away from casinos, including the prosecution of prominent business executives such as former Suncity Group CEO Alvin Chau and greater demands for the six concessionaires to develop public attractions not related to gambling.

For the past twenty years, these six concessionaires–consisting of three Macau-origin firms (SJM Holdings, Galaxy Entertainment, Melco Resorts) and three Las Vegas-origin firms (Las Vegas Sands, Wynn Resorts, MGM Resorts)–have dominated the urban landscape of the former Portuguese colony, raking in eye-watering profits for their parent companies year after year, as well as producing jobs and huge tax revenues for the Macanese.

This mutually profitable era came to an abrupt end with the arrival of the Covid pandemic. Despite serial predictions that business as usual would soon return, the realization has gradually set in that the old era is, in fact, over and done.

The Macau gaming concessions, which were issued at the beginning of this century on a twenty-year basis, have now run their course, and a relicensing process is underway. Two points which have become clear are that Macau’s government is going to demand increased contributions from the casino operators for non-gambling aspects of the local economy, and that the profits these companies put in their own pockets will be much reduced.

Beyond the purely local implications, the central government in Beijing has also been paying greater attention to the Macau Special Administrative Region, as it is officially designated.

Macau is increasingly viewed as merely one constituent element of the so-called Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area. Industry (including the tourism industry) is being developed around this regional concept, with Macau playing its role as the primary entertainment hub of the Greater Bay Area and its population of about 87 million people.

In this way, as Ho put it in his address last week, his administration will “create a new situation in the practice of ‘One Country, Two Systems'” and “make new contributions toward promoting the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

Also behind the policy shift is the increasingly overt view expressed by Beijing that Macau has often acted in the past as a magnet for corruption within the Chinese state, and that it is finally time to bring it more fully under control.

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