Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming May 2016 10 Hengqin island lies some 200 meters west of Macau and is about three times the size of the former Portuguese colony. In 2009 China designated the island as a Free Economic Zone, opening a new district for Macau’s development with complementing industries; just as Pudong was created as a Special Economic Zone for Shanghai to expand across the Huangpu river in the 1990s. Border controls will be substantially relaxed to facilitate this. Joint administration is being discussed. If the grand project succeeds, Hengqin and Macau will have converged into something of a single destination long before Macau’s term as a Special Administrative Region expires in 2049. Cover Story By Muhammad Cohen , Editor At Large Muhammad Cohen also blogs for Forbes on gaming throughout Asia and wrote Hong Kong On Air , a novel set during the 1997 handover about TV news, love, betrayal, high finance and cheap lingerie. H ow you see Hengqin depends on what you’re looking for. A decade ago, Las Vegas Sands saw the island in Zhuhai municipality, back then with just a few thousand inhabitants, as a potential extension of Macau’s Cotai district and tried to lease it from Guangdong provincial authorities. Perhaps stirred by Sands, mainland authorities kept the island. Then in 2009 they made it one of China’s three pilot Free Economic Zones, a project overseen by Beijing and inaugurated under the guidance of then-Vice President Xi Jinping, who included Hengqin on his first trip outside Beijing as Chinese Communist Party chairman in 2012. Despite the changes, some still see Hengqin as Cotai’s backyard. Isle of Wait An aerial rendering of Hengqin island . From south to north on the east coast can be seen Chimelong’s Ocean Kingdom, the University of Macau, the Lotus Bridge crossing and at the top, Hengqin’s Central Business District (CBD).