Gangs no deterrent to Chinese gamblers - REFLECTIONS IN A CHINESE EYE

Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning, and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These ,too, will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China always changes. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is... ,,,,,,,,W.D. Box

08/15/2012

Gangs no deterrent to Chinese gamblers

Galaxy Macau, which opened last year, is one of Macau's biggest, most glittering attractions. Source: AP

Tedious, certainly, and a needlessly cruel time tax to impose on people about to drop stacks of money on the turn of a card, but not wildly unusual. Weekends normally strain Macau's hopelessly underpowered, bureaucratic infrastructure as thousands of Chinese jostle their way to the baccarat tables.

But the length of the queues in China's only legal gambling enclave is worth noting for two reasons. The first is that the lines of visitors were snaking around the arrivals hall in cheerful defiance of recent news. This month, police in the former Portuguese colony swooped on several casinos and hotels and rounded up more than 150 people. The raids followed three murders over the previous fortnight and come amid fears that the bad old days of gang warfare may return to Macau, particularly when the triad kingpin Wan "Broken Tooth" Kuok-koi is released from prison later in the year.

Read more at The Australian

Aug 15, 2012 3:40:10 AM | Crime, Current Affairs

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