No abstract

After nearly 450 years of colonial administration, Portugal returned the territory of Macao to the People's Republic of China in 1999. Following the handover, Macao's postcolonial government dismantled the forty-year-old local gambling monopoly and opened Macao to investment by gaming companies from North America, Australia, and Hong Kong. These companies are collectively spending $25 billion to tap the increasingly affluent and mobile market of tourists just across the border in mainland China. This investment has prompted remarkable economic development in the tiny city as well as a phantasmagoric transformation of the cityscape and a concomitant transmutation of Macao's social landscape. Understanding contemporary Macao requires attending to how the legacies of Portuguese colonialism and fascism and Chinese communism and market socialism merge in the spaces of the city today. Drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin's dialectical analysis of the obsolete commodities of mass culture, this paper meditates through text and photographs on four copresent moments of Macao—socialist fossil, colonial ruin, capitalist dream, and Utopian wish. A form of physiognomic urban ‘dream analysis’ rescues these multiple contradictory meanings of Macau and investigates the city's crucial role in both China's economic reforms and its Utopian desires.

The 442-year Portuguese colonial presence in Macau influenced the city's café scene comprised of Portuguese coffee shops and southern Chinese cafés (locally referred to as tsa tsan teing). These cafés are an important element of everyday social life in Macau. However, Portugal's handover of Macau to the People's Republic of China in 1999 prompted significant changes in the composition of the population and in the spaces of everyday urban life and leisure. The concomitant dismantling of the 40-year gambling monopoly and opening to foreign investment has brought new casinos and other themed leisure spaces to Macau, attracting 20 million tourists to the tiny city in 1997. One increasingly observable material dimension of these changes is the introduction of western franchises and chain outlets like Starbucks, Haagen Dazs, 7—11, and McDonald's — as well as their local imitators — leading to the increasing homogenization of facades and urban spaces and standardization of service work and related cultural practices. Starbucks and other commercial café spaces in Macau participate in the aestheticization of social life in the city, increasingly transforming Macau's quotidian public life into an arena of spectacle and performance where café activity becomes focused less on functional eating and drinking and collectivistic group belonging and sociability and more on individual display of lifestyle for others. This aestheticization also leads to an increased aesthetic reflexivity among people. This transformation is explored in two ways: analysis of formal training of service workers in a standardized performance of `friendliness'; and analysis of representations of café consumption in Macau that encourage people to see café activity as a mode of individual performance.

Following Portugal’s handover of the colony of Macao to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1999, the city has undergone an intense period of transformation. The PRC liberalized the monopolistic local gambling industry, which comprises the bulk of Macao’s economy, allowing foreign gaming companies to enter the market. These companies are investing approximately $25 billion to construct a phantasmagoric themed cityscape of casinos, hotels and entertainment zones that is a marked departure from Macao’s extant colonial architecture. This article analyzes the production of this new transnational landscape in Macao and the pedagogical function of these themed environments in the consumption practices of post-socialist tourists from mainland China, who make up more than half of the 30 million tourists who visited the tiny city in 2008. A socio-semiotic methodology reveals the way themed environments provide a spatial syntax and semantics that indexes consumption, making Macao a didactic laboratory of consumerism.

This article investigates the tendency towards an interiorized and encapsulated urbanity in Macau and the functional role of this phenomenon in the ‘mental life’ of Chinese consumers. A Portuguese territory for half a millennium, Macau was returned to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1999; the postcolonial, semi‐autonomous Macau Special Administrative Region has subsequently become the most lucrative casino gaming site in the world, far surpassing casino revenues earned in Las Vegas. This article investigates the manner in which the local government of the city‐state and the central government of the PRC have colluded with transnational capital to effect a remarkable enclosure of the urban commons in Macau. The entire city today may be understood as a biopolitical laboratory of consumption, where the PRC uses a preferential exit visa policy to allow tourists from select, relatively affluent provinces access to Macau. The new built environment of the city naturalizes a radical urban imaginary and corresponding post‐socialist ‘quality’ consumer subject; that subject is crucial to the macroeconomic goals of the PRC and the sustainability of global capitalism.