If you are having trouble with the NLR website, please provide details here, and we will try to improve the site accordingly.
New Left Review 50, March-April 2008
The transformation of the former Portuguese enclave of Macau into East Asia’s gambling capital by an alliance of local elites and Las Vegas entrepreneurs, under the approving gaze of Beijing. A frenzy of construction, rising inequalities and rampant corruption as outcomes of a neon-lit decolonization.
LIU SHIH-DIING
CASINO COLONY
On the sweltering afternoon of May Day, 2007, a rare mass protest of construction workers, local civil servants and others took place in the streets of Macau. [*] Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets with banners bearing a range of slogans—against corruption, for housing rights and better livelihoods, against the influx of illegal labour—and chanting calls for the resignation of Macau’s chief executive, Edmund Ho Hau-Wah. The march was organized by a coalition of six small labour unions but was joined along the way by many sympathetic bystanders. At the junction of Avenida do Coronel Mesquita and Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro, in the heart of the old Portuguese colonial city, an altercation with the police over the protest’s route turned into a series of scuffles, and one citizen was seriously wounded as a policeman fired five gunshots. [1]
|
Subscribe for just £35 and get free access to the archive Please login on the left to read more or buy the article for £3 |
’My institution subscribes to NLR, why can't I access this article?’