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.
Vaccines and pills instead of glitter and gambling: The casino metropolis of Macau drew in Chinese tourists for a different reason in recent days than is usually the case. While the city’s roulette tables and slot machines remained empty in many places between the years, pharmacies and medical facilities experienced a strong influx.
The British newspaper Financial Times reported a veritable vaccination tourism in the city. Mainland Chinese took advantage of the lifting of travel restrictions and flocked to Macau to obtain better protection against Covid infection with the Biontech vaccine. This is because, unlike in the rest of the country, the Biontech vaccine is approved in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau.
Meanwhile, demand for paracetamol and cold remedies surged in the city’s pharmacies. But just like in the casinos, most customers there were left with nothing but a long face. The drugs are already sold out due to the strong demand. This is because, with the end of Beijing’s strict zero-Covid policy, which also affected Macau, a surge of infections swept through the city, drastically driving up the demand for painkillers and cold sprays.
The high level of sick leave also weighs heavily on hotels and restaurants. “We have had hardly any staff in the past few days and can therefore currently only offer guests a fraction of our rooms,” reports an employee of a five-star hotel, who was not allowed to speak on behalf of the company by name. Even the reduced business could only be maintained because some employees had agreed to come to work sick.
Because many restaurants and stores even had to close entirely due to absent staff, the end of the year in Macau was correspondingly bleak. The famous casinos, which rake in more revenue every year in Macau than in Las Vegas, fought over the few tourists looking to gamble.
The former Portuguese enclave, which is also famous for its glamorous New Year’s Eve parties, bid a comparatively quiet farewell to a weak economic year. Rarely before have the city’s residents been reminded so clearly of how dependent they are on Chinese gamblers. Their trips to the peninsula provide the Chinese special administrative region with more than half of its annual economic output. The wish to make Macau an international gambling hotspot was never fulfilled.
Analysts estimate that Macau’s economy contracted by around 29 percent in 2022. In 2020, the economy had already shrunk by 54 percent. This was followed by a slight recovery of 18 percent in 2021 as China managed to keep the virus under control for a while. Gross gambling revenue dropped another 51 percent year-on-year to 42.2 billion patacas (about 4.9 billion euros). In 2019, the year before the pandemic, casinos had still turned over 292 billion patacas.
“A black year is coming to an end. But the bottom has probably been reached. We expect 2023 to bring very good results,” one store owner summed up the current mood in the city. Just how bad things actually were for Macau’s economy last year is revealed by government figures released on Sunday. Casinos had their worst year since 2004.
Investors expect a steep recovery after the end of the current Covid wave, a trend that is already reflected in the stock prices of casino operators. An index published by the financial news service Bloomberg, which summarizes the shares of gambling operators in Macau, has already shot up by more than 30 percent since the start of December.
Investors are not just optimistic because they speculate that tourists will return to Macau in droves over the Chinese New Year around January 22. The fact that all six casino operators were able to extend their licenses for a further ten years after a long period of uncertainty also brought relief. Nothing now stands in the way of a strong recovery. Joern Petring
In mid-November, a video of a woman from Dalian went viral on Chinese social media channels. At the breakfast table, the 36-year-old explains that she would prefer a “high-quality single life” to a “low-quality” marriage in any case. “I think women nowadays don’t live in a time where they have to depend on men in a marriage.”
The popularity of this otherwise unremarkable video shows that it is still a bold statement in China to publicly question the purpose of marriage. In China, women can make a career – nowhere in Asia are there so many millionaires. Without a husband, however, women are still socially stigmatized and economically disadvantaged.
The magnitude of this problem is illustrated by a 2019 report from a government-affiliated research institute, which estimated the number of single mothers in China to be more than 19 million, including divorcees and widows. At the same time, the divorce rate nearly doubled between 2009 and 2018, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Surveys show that Chinese women are getting married later and later, especially in cities – if at all.
In 2020, only 8.1 million couples got married, the lowest number since 2003, according to government data. In Shanghai, the average age at which women marry for the first time is 29. In 2005, it was still 23. This also pushes back child planning.
Unmarried single mothers in particular fall through the cracks of patriarchal role models. Legally, they find themselves in a gray area in China. Although official policies do not explicitly prohibit unmarried women from having children, many provinces and municipalities still treat illegitimate births as a violation of family planning policies.
According to the definition of the National Health Commission, family planning is the responsibility of “husbands and wives”. Accordingly, state benefits such as parental leave and medical examinations before and after birth are often reserved for women with valid marriage certificates. As a result, many single mothers have trouble, for example, obtaining hukou registration for their children, which is necessary, for example, to enroll them in school or to receive social benefits. This is another reason why premarital pregnancies in China still often lead to “flash marriages” or abortions.
A representative of the Guangdong National People’s Congress said last February that the family planning law may require some clarifications to meet the needs of single mothers. He acknowledged that women find themselves in a legal predicament. This is surprising, since the Chinese state has set out to “optimize birth policies and promote long-term balanced population development” due to falling birth rates.
However, how to deal with single mothers is left to the discretion of local governments. In Shanghai and the province of Guangdong, new regulations were introduced in the past two years that no longer require the submission of a marriage certificate to apply for social benefits. The Anhui provincial health commission also introduced draft legislation last September to lift the ban on the registration of birth for unmarried women.
In reality, the implementation of these guidelines still faces contradictions and bureaucratic hurdles. Time and again, unmarried mothers are turned away by local authorities. In other cases, they are charged processing fees that married couples do not have to pay.
Having children on their own, for example through artificial insemination or surrogacy, is illegal for unmarried Chinese women. Only married women are allowed to freeze their oocytes, for example in the case of fertility problems. Single men, on the other hand, can freeze their sperm without any bureaucratic hurdles. The health authorities justify this policy by arguing that retrieving eggs from women and giving birth at an older age entails health risks.
That is why many Chinese women travel abroad to have artificial insemination performed, for example in Thailand, the USA or Denmark. Ukraine was also a popular destination before the war. Agencies disguised as travel agencies offer such services. Those who can afford it can become mothers without husbands. However, there is still a long way to go before such children are socially accepted.
Young men in Taiwan will soon have to serve much longer in the armed forces: Starting in 2024, the duration of mandatory military service will be increased from four to twelve months. The regulation will affect those born in 2005 and later.
President Tsai Ing-wen justified the decision by citing the growing threat from the People’s Republic of China. “Nobody wants war, but peace does not fall from the sky … We need to actively prepare for war to prevent war,” Tsai said. Taiwan, she said, is at the forefront of defending democracy and is therefore actively taking steps “to uphold our nation’s sovereignty, values and interest in regional peace and stability.” grz
Construction of a new giant bridge over the Mekong River began in eastern Cambodia on Monday. The crossing in the province of Kratie is expected to be 1,761 meters long and 13.5 meters wide. Construction is scheduled to be completed in 2026, according to the Cambodian newspaper Khmer Times. In addition, several hundred kilometers of connecting roads will be built. The costs of 114 million dollars will be largely covered by China.
By making large investments, China attempts to gain influence in numerous countries, not only in Cambodia, but also in Eastern and Central Europe (China.Table reported). In Germany, a heated debate recently arose over Chinese investments in the port of Hamburg (China.Table reported). Especially in poorer countries in Southeast Asia or Africa, Beijing has had great success with this strategy.
Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen also attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the new bridge over the Mekong River. He praised the excellent relations with China and expressed his gratitude to Beijing for financing important infrastructure projects in Cambodia. rad
Gudrun Wacker was already a China expert back when Taiwan was still a dictatorship. Much has changed since then. Authoritarian China threatens the small democracy of Taiwan. And as a Senior Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), Wacker has to try and predict how long this will continue.
However, she does not have “a crystal ball,” says Wacker. And therefore, of course, even she cannot predict when China will attack Taiwan. But she can approach the question by consulting with trusted colleagues from around the world, reading their publications, and trying to understand Beijing’s deliberations.
“I believe that the People’s Republic is pursuing a pretty smart policy,” Wacker says. Xi Jinping makes a simple cost-benefit calculation. According to Wacker, the price of an invasion currently still outweighs the benefits. That is why China tries to change the status quo step by step. Wacker calls this a “strategy of attrition” involving military exercises, cyberattacks, and disinformation campaigns.
Is this strategy successful? Wacker sees various trends: Fewer and fewer Taiwanese identify with the People’s Republic. And Russia’s war against Ukraine has made the Taiwanese aware of the threat of an attack, Wacker explains. Nevertheless, they have also become accustomed to the constant threatening gestures.
Wacker can relate to that. She herself grew up during the Cold War and, she says, was not intimidated or paralyzed by the constant threat of war. “You can’t live your life like that,” she recalls.
Her parents actually wanted Wacker to become a teacher. But the overcrowded German language and literature seminars deterred her, so she decided to study Sinology in Berlin, including a stay abroad in Taiwan.
The landlord of her student apartment on the island was a former Kuomintang officer, Wacker says. His party lost the civil war in Mainland China in 1949, fled to Taiwan, and ruled the island in a largely authoritarian manner until the 1990s. The native Taiwanese initially had to subordinate themselves to the immigrant Mainland Chinese. And Wacker recalls that her landlord also made no secret of his disdain for the locals.
Today, Taiwan is a vibrant democracy and is governed by the Democratic Progressive Party, which clearly distances itself from the People’s Republic of China. To keep things peaceful, Wacker would like to see more support for Taiwan, including from Germany. Again, it is a question of costs and benefits. The German government must show China that an invasion of Taiwan would come at a high price. In addition, relations with Taiwan could be upgraded, even without questioning the one-China principle. For example, through working visits by German ministers to Taiwan, Wacker suggests.
She observes with concern that a considerable rift has developed between Western and Chinese politicians and political advisors. According to Wacker, “all you can do is try to shout across it.” While that will not change the positions of either side, Wacker believes that people still need to take the opportunity to voice their own arguments. “We have to try to poke into the bubble they’re living in by now,” she explains, in light of an ever-narrowing opinion corridor in China. Jonathan Lehrer
Winter sports nation China: On New Year’s Day, people flocked to the frozen Songhua River in the northwestern metropolis of Harbin to go ice sledding and ice skating.
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.
Vaccines and pills instead of glitter and gambling: The casino metropolis of Macau drew in Chinese tourists for a different reason in recent days than is usually the case. While the city’s roulette tables and slot machines remained empty in many places between the years, pharmacies and medical facilities experienced a strong influx.
The British newspaper Financial Times reported a veritable vaccination tourism in the city. Mainland Chinese took advantage of the lifting of travel restrictions and flocked to Macau to obtain better protection against Covid infection with the Biontech vaccine. This is because, unlike in the rest of the country, the Biontech vaccine is approved in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau.
Meanwhile, demand for paracetamol and cold remedies surged in the city’s pharmacies. But just like in the casinos, most customers there were left with nothing but a long face. The drugs are already sold out due to the strong demand. This is because, with the end of Beijing’s strict zero-Covid policy, which also affected Macau, a surge of infections swept through the city, drastically driving up the demand for painkillers and cold sprays.
The high level of sick leave also weighs heavily on hotels and restaurants. “We have had hardly any staff in the past few days and can therefore currently only offer guests a fraction of our rooms,” reports an employee of a five-star hotel, who was not allowed to speak on behalf of the company by name. Even the reduced business could only be maintained because some employees had agreed to come to work sick.
Because many restaurants and stores even had to close entirely due to absent staff, the end of the year in Macau was correspondingly bleak. The famous casinos, which rake in more revenue every year in Macau than in Las Vegas, fought over the few tourists looking to gamble.
The former Portuguese enclave, which is also famous for its glamorous New Year’s Eve parties, bid a comparatively quiet farewell to a weak economic year. Rarely before have the city’s residents been reminded so clearly of how dependent they are on Chinese gamblers. Their trips to the peninsula provide the Chinese special administrative region with more than half of its annual economic output. The wish to make Macau an international gambling hotspot was never fulfilled.
Analysts estimate that Macau’s economy contracted by around 29 percent in 2022. In 2020, the economy had already shrunk by 54 percent. This was followed by a slight recovery of 18 percent in 2021 as China managed to keep the virus under control for a while. Gross gambling revenue dropped another 51 percent year-on-year to 42.2 billion patacas (about 4.9 billion euros). In 2019, the year before the pandemic, casinos had still turned over 292 billion patacas.
“A black year is coming to an end. But the bottom has probably been reached. We expect 2023 to bring very good results,” one store owner summed up the current mood in the city. Just how bad things actually were for Macau’s economy last year is revealed by government figures released on Sunday. Casinos had their worst year since 2004.
Investors expect a steep recovery after the end of the current Covid wave, a trend that is already reflected in the stock prices of casino operators. An index published by the financial news service Bloomberg, which summarizes the shares of gambling operators in Macau, has already shot up by more than 30 percent since the start of December.
Investors are not just optimistic because they speculate that tourists will return to Macau in droves over the Chinese New Year around January 22. The fact that all six casino operators were able to extend their licenses for a further ten years after a long period of uncertainty also brought relief. Nothing now stands in the way of a strong recovery. Joern Petring
In mid-November, a video of a woman from Dalian went viral on Chinese social media channels. At the breakfast table, the 36-year-old explains that she would prefer a “high-quality single life” to a “low-quality” marriage in any case. “I think women nowadays don’t live in a time where they have to depend on men in a marriage.”
The popularity of this otherwise unremarkable video shows that it is still a bold statement in China to publicly question the purpose of marriage. In China, women can make a career – nowhere in Asia are there so many millionaires. Without a husband, however, women are still socially stigmatized and economically disadvantaged.
The magnitude of this problem is illustrated by a 2019 report from a government-affiliated research institute, which estimated the number of single mothers in China to be more than 19 million, including divorcees and widows. At the same time, the divorce rate nearly doubled between 2009 and 2018, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. Surveys show that Chinese women are getting married later and later, especially in cities – if at all.
In 2020, only 8.1 million couples got married, the lowest number since 2003, according to government data. In Shanghai, the average age at which women marry for the first time is 29. In 2005, it was still 23. This also pushes back child planning.
Unmarried single mothers in particular fall through the cracks of patriarchal role models. Legally, they find themselves in a gray area in China. Although official policies do not explicitly prohibit unmarried women from having children, many provinces and municipalities still treat illegitimate births as a violation of family planning policies.
According to the definition of the National Health Commission, family planning is the responsibility of “husbands and wives”. Accordingly, state benefits such as parental leave and medical examinations before and after birth are often reserved for women with valid marriage certificates. As a result, many single mothers have trouble, for example, obtaining hukou registration for their children, which is necessary, for example, to enroll them in school or to receive social benefits. This is another reason why premarital pregnancies in China still often lead to “flash marriages” or abortions.
A representative of the Guangdong National People’s Congress said last February that the family planning law may require some clarifications to meet the needs of single mothers. He acknowledged that women find themselves in a legal predicament. This is surprising, since the Chinese state has set out to “optimize birth policies and promote long-term balanced population development” due to falling birth rates.
However, how to deal with single mothers is left to the discretion of local governments. In Shanghai and the province of Guangdong, new regulations were introduced in the past two years that no longer require the submission of a marriage certificate to apply for social benefits. The Anhui provincial health commission also introduced draft legislation last September to lift the ban on the registration of birth for unmarried women.
In reality, the implementation of these guidelines still faces contradictions and bureaucratic hurdles. Time and again, unmarried mothers are turned away by local authorities. In other cases, they are charged processing fees that married couples do not have to pay.
Having children on their own, for example through artificial insemination or surrogacy, is illegal for unmarried Chinese women. Only married women are allowed to freeze their oocytes, for example in the case of fertility problems. Single men, on the other hand, can freeze their sperm without any bureaucratic hurdles. The health authorities justify this policy by arguing that retrieving eggs from women and giving birth at an older age entails health risks.
That is why many Chinese women travel abroad to have artificial insemination performed, for example in Thailand, the USA or Denmark. Ukraine was also a popular destination before the war. Agencies disguised as travel agencies offer such services. Those who can afford it can become mothers without husbands. However, there is still a long way to go before such children are socially accepted.
Young men in Taiwan will soon have to serve much longer in the armed forces: Starting in 2024, the duration of mandatory military service will be increased from four to twelve months. The regulation will affect those born in 2005 and later.
President Tsai Ing-wen justified the decision by citing the growing threat from the People’s Republic of China. “Nobody wants war, but peace does not fall from the sky … We need to actively prepare for war to prevent war,” Tsai said. Taiwan, she said, is at the forefront of defending democracy and is therefore actively taking steps “to uphold our nation’s sovereignty, values and interest in regional peace and stability.” grz
Construction of a new giant bridge over the Mekong River began in eastern Cambodia on Monday. The crossing in the province of Kratie is expected to be 1,761 meters long and 13.5 meters wide. Construction is scheduled to be completed in 2026, according to the Cambodian newspaper Khmer Times. In addition, several hundred kilometers of connecting roads will be built. The costs of 114 million dollars will be largely covered by China.
By making large investments, China attempts to gain influence in numerous countries, not only in Cambodia, but also in Eastern and Central Europe (China.Table reported). In Germany, a heated debate recently arose over Chinese investments in the port of Hamburg (China.Table reported). Especially in poorer countries in Southeast Asia or Africa, Beijing has had great success with this strategy.
Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen also attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the new bridge over the Mekong River. He praised the excellent relations with China and expressed his gratitude to Beijing for financing important infrastructure projects in Cambodia. rad
Gudrun Wacker was already a China expert back when Taiwan was still a dictatorship. Much has changed since then. Authoritarian China threatens the small democracy of Taiwan. And as a Senior Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), Wacker has to try and predict how long this will continue.
However, she does not have “a crystal ball,” says Wacker. And therefore, of course, even she cannot predict when China will attack Taiwan. But she can approach the question by consulting with trusted colleagues from around the world, reading their publications, and trying to understand Beijing’s deliberations.
“I believe that the People’s Republic is pursuing a pretty smart policy,” Wacker says. Xi Jinping makes a simple cost-benefit calculation. According to Wacker, the price of an invasion currently still outweighs the benefits. That is why China tries to change the status quo step by step. Wacker calls this a “strategy of attrition” involving military exercises, cyberattacks, and disinformation campaigns.
Is this strategy successful? Wacker sees various trends: Fewer and fewer Taiwanese identify with the People’s Republic. And Russia’s war against Ukraine has made the Taiwanese aware of the threat of an attack, Wacker explains. Nevertheless, they have also become accustomed to the constant threatening gestures.
Wacker can relate to that. She herself grew up during the Cold War and, she says, was not intimidated or paralyzed by the constant threat of war. “You can’t live your life like that,” she recalls.
Her parents actually wanted Wacker to become a teacher. But the overcrowded German language and literature seminars deterred her, so she decided to study Sinology in Berlin, including a stay abroad in Taiwan.
The landlord of her student apartment on the island was a former Kuomintang officer, Wacker says. His party lost the civil war in Mainland China in 1949, fled to Taiwan, and ruled the island in a largely authoritarian manner until the 1990s. The native Taiwanese initially had to subordinate themselves to the immigrant Mainland Chinese. And Wacker recalls that her landlord also made no secret of his disdain for the locals.
Today, Taiwan is a vibrant democracy and is governed by the Democratic Progressive Party, which clearly distances itself from the People’s Republic of China. To keep things peaceful, Wacker would like to see more support for Taiwan, including from Germany. Again, it is a question of costs and benefits. The German government must show China that an invasion of Taiwan would come at a high price. In addition, relations with Taiwan could be upgraded, even without questioning the one-China principle. For example, through working visits by German ministers to Taiwan, Wacker suggests.
She observes with concern that a considerable rift has developed between Western and Chinese politicians and political advisors. According to Wacker, “all you can do is try to shout across it.” While that will not change the positions of either side, Wacker believes that people still need to take the opportunity to voice their own arguments. “We have to try to poke into the bubble they’re living in by now,” she explains, in light of an ever-narrowing opinion corridor in China. Jonathan Lehrer
Winter sports nation China: On New Year’s Day, people flocked to the frozen Songhua River in the northwestern metropolis of Harbin to go ice sledding and ice skating.
