Macao’s post-Mao grand tour: China’s gamble on urbanization in the Venetian Macao Resort

ABSTRACT

The Venetian Macao Resort is one of the world’s largest buildings and Macao’s most popular attraction, visited by millions of tourists each year from mainland China. This article explores the Venetian’s function in China’s National New-Type Urbanization Plan, a macro-economic initiative implemented in 2014 by China’s central government. The project aims to urbanize hundreds of millions of rural Chinese citizens in hopes that these new urbanites will create a domestic consumption economy powerful enough to sustain economic growth. One key to enhancing urban consumption levels is fostering what Louis Wirth called ‘urbanism as a way of life’ – the density, heterogeneity, and anonymity of urban experience that stimulates market activity. Drawing on indigenous Chinese theories of education, and China’s pedagogical use of normative models to guide ethical behavior, this article analyzes the Venetian as an encapsulated model city in this national urbanization plan. It explores how tourists in the Venetian experience a normative mode of ‘urbanism as a way of life’ that comports post-socialist consumers, and contributes to the country’s economic development. As a privatized urban enclosure, the Venetian constitutes an architectonic resolution to the inherent contradiction of China’s macro-economic planning, and the risks that urbanization poses to the central government.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• urbanism
• urbanization
• post-socialist
• consumption
• quality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Barthes (1957), Baudrillard (1994), Eco (1986). For a sample of postmodern criticism of Las Vegas themed environments see Begout (2004); Cass (2004); Franci and Zignani (2005); Minca (2005); Raento and Flusty (2006); Waltrep (2002). On postmodern criticism of Macao’s resorts, see Mao (2006).

2 “With the erosion of basic education in the rural areas as a consequence of the dismantling of rural collectives, migration is celebrated as a substitute to fill the void” (Yan, 2008, p. 124). Many migrant parents clearly agree with the government’s assumption that the city serves as an informal school in which to develop individual quality; some choose for their children to remain in urban areas for extended periods to garner pedagogical benefits and cultural capital, even though this decision means that the children are prohibited from pursuing formal secondary school and college education there (Tian, 2019).

3 Marx himself contended that the way in which the urban industrial factory collected together otherwise isolated rural workers and created the means for their affective associations, meant that the factory was not only a site of labor production but also of potential working-class enlightenment and organization. And Hardt and Negri (2009) argue that under contemporary conditions of biopolitical production, the city itself takes on this potential revolutionary function. In their words, “the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial working class.”

4 On the history of land reclamation projects in Macao, see Daniel (2018).

5 While Hong Kong has no casino resorts, the city is home to numerous luxury shopping malls that attract tens of millions of mainland Chinese tourists each year. However, the overwhelming structural density of the city, combined with the inordinately high cost of real estate, means that Hong Kong’s malls typically do not approach the massive horizontal urban footprint of Macao’s integrated resorts. Instead, shopping malls in Hong Kong are predominantly vertical high-rise structures, and many are integrated into the urban fabric via construction atop the city’s numerous public MTR (underground train) stations; this unique development is largely a result of the city’s colonial-era land lease policy. For a comparison of the distinct role of shopping malls and integrated resorts in Hong Kong and Macao, respectively, see Al (2016; 2018).

6 By contrast, about 10% of Hong Kong’s population of approximately 7.5 million is comprised of expatriates (Arcibal, 2021).

7 Sennett’s general conviction in the educational potential of the built environment is consistent with both the socialist designers of the Chinese danwei, and the contemporary technocratic planners of the National New-Type Urbanization Plan.

8 “Spectacle is not primarily concerned with a looking at images but rather with the construction of conditions that individuate, immobilize, and separate subjects, even within a world in which mobility and circulation are ubiquitous” (Crary, 2001, p. 74).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tim Simpson

Tim Simpson is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Macau, where he has worked since 2001. His forthcoming book, to be published by the University of Minnesota Press, is entitled Macau: Baccarat, biopolitics, and casino capitalism.