Covid hurts casinos + Taboos for the unmarried

Macau is not just known for its glamorous casinos, but also for its spectacular fireworks displays at the end of the year. But what our author team had to experience these days in Macau exposes the big problems of the Chinese Special Administrative Region: The New Year passed rather quietly, because there was no reason to celebrate at all.

Instead of quick money, the few Mainland tourists in Macau prefer to chase Western vaccines, painkillers and cold sprays. But without gambling tourism, restaurants and hoteliers cannot survive. The casinos in Macau generate more revenue each year than all the establishments in the American gambling eldorado of Las Vegas.

It is the same Chinese pragmatism of these vaccine tourists for which many observers praise the Chinese government when it comes to dealing with urgent problems. Be it on a small scale, in Beijing’s situational interpretation of regulations that are deliberately kept vague – or on a large scale, when private entrepreneurs are welcomed into the Communist Party with open arms because they have simply become too important for the country’s economic development.

Deng Xiaoping’s quote that he doesn’t care about the color of a cat’s fur, as long as it catches mice, has long become a popular saying in the West. In today’s analysis, Fabian Peltsch shows that Beijing’s pragmatism is quite absent when it comes to social policy: It is about the plight of single mothers in China. Despite declining birth rates and growing demographic pressure, the government in Beijing maintains its patriarchal understanding of gender roles – to the detriment of unmarried women and single mothers.

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Michael Radunski