人口45万，面积仅是纽约中央公园的10倍。多年来经济增速一直是中国内地的两倍。名义人均国内生产总值(GDP)约4万美元，高于英国，与德国大致相当。你猜它是哪？它就是澳门。
澳门是中国的博彩中心，也是这个有13亿之众、为赌博疯狂的国家里唯一一个进赌场赌博合法的地方。它是获得官方批准的安全阀。政府将压抑的赌徒们赶到这个小小的半岛上，在这里，他们平均1.4天就会输掉大量资金，主要是在百家乐纸牌上。去年，他们在赌桌上留下了约230亿美元（澳门政府从中抽取了40%），约是美国人为拉斯维加斯赌场贡献收入的4倍。
最近澳门之所以成为新闻焦点，是因为89岁亿万富翁何鸿�(Stanley Ho)的传奇故事。40年前，澳门的葡萄牙殖民者批准其建立博彩垄断企业，何鸿�因此发家。如今，他卷入了一场不体面的争斗，争夺对象是他据估算高达31亿美元的财富。他与四位太太生育的至少16个子女组成的竞争派系，正无所不用其极地争抢他的财富。通常，这种景象在家长入土为安后才会见到。而何鸿�注定要在他的有生之年目睹这场闹剧。这已足够使一夫多妻制蒙上坏名声。
但与澳门自身的经历相比，围绕传奇何氏家族的闹剧，仅仅是小打小闹。葡萄牙于1557年将澳门确立为贸易站，比香港沦为英国殖民地早了约300年。香港日益崛起为金融中心，迫使澳门转而专营不光彩的业务：赌博、卖淫与放高利贷。在1999年移交给中国前夕，澳门仍是一个声名狼藉之地，街头经常会上演帮派枪战。
北京做了一个战略决定——整顿澳门。它还希望将该地区打造成亚洲首屈一指的博彩胜地。正如香港是中国的银行业中心一样，澳门也将成为它的博彩中心。这两个特别行政区将向台湾展示，接受统一后、自由处理自己的事务是可能的。
澳门的暴力事件几乎立刻止息了。何鸿�的垄断也于2002年结束。澳门政府向美国内华达州博彩大王谢尔登•阿德尔森(Sheldon Adelson)与史蒂夫•韦恩(Steve Wynn)颁发了两张新牌照。2004年，阿德尔森的澳门金沙(Sands Macao)开张，大批赌客蜂拥而入。仅8个月，这第一座迎合中国大众市场赌徒需求的赌场便收回了成本。随后，阿德尔森又建设了带有3000个房间的酒店与会议中心澳门威尼斯人(Venetian Macao)，从而打造出了全世界最大的赌场，还是为数不多的几个可以在室内乘坐贡多拉的地方之一。韦恩也开设了一座更高端、服务更周到的赌场，结果证明同样大受欢迎。
澳门五分之四的收入都来自博彩业（拉斯维加斯不到一半），而博彩收入又主要由豪赌客贡献。官方而言，中国公民每年只能兑换约5万美元的硬通货。但许多豪赌客花的钱却远不止这么多。他们之所以可以这么做，要归功于所谓的赌场掮客。赌客可提供人民币计价的抵押品，向这些掮客换取硬通货赌注。如果赌客赢了，可以保留他的硬通货收入。如果输了，则以人民币偿还。
由于准确地说这些贷款并不受官方认可，也无法根据中国的法庭制度强制执行，放贷人都是以老式做法收账。专注于澳门的分析师坚称，大部分赌资都是合法的。据里昂证券(CLSA)估计去年的赌资达7500亿美元。但洗钱机会也显而易见。关于由赌场掮客结清的债务，里昂证券令人宽慰地写道，“注意，媒体报道的与收账相关的人身侵犯或死亡数字之低令人吃惊。”
北京可能希望，外国运营商可以进一步推动澳门朝着会议业务与大众市场博彩的方向发展。这将大大减轻它对变化无常、可能混不见底的豪赌客世界的依赖。
与此同时，澳门正大发博彩财。去年，现金充裕的澳门政府向每位澳门人派发了750美元“财富共享补助”。只要垄断继续，博彩收入到底由谁贡献也许并不是特别重要。澳门政府才是真正的庄家。
译者/何黎
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001036862
It is just 10 times the size of New York’s Central Park with a population of 450,000. Its economy has been growing at twice the speed of China’s for several years. Its nominal gross domestic product per capita is roughly $40,000, about the same as Germany and higher than the UK. Place your bets: the city in question is Macao. Macao is China’s gambling capital, the only place in a gambling-crazy country of 1.3bn people where it is legal to bet in a casino. It is an officially sanctioned safety valve. China’s frustrated gamblers are corralled into a tiny peninsula, where they spend an average 1.4 days losing bucket-loads of money, principally on baccarat. Last year, they left about $23bn on the table (of which Macao’s government takes a 40 per cent cut) some four times the amount Americans donated to the casinos of Las Vegas.
Macao has been in the news because of the extraordinary saga of Stanley Ho, the 89-year-old billionaire who made his fortune from a 40-year gambling monopoly granted by Macao’s Portuguese colonisers. Mr Ho is in the midst of an unseemly tussle for his estimated $3.1bn fortune. Competing factions from at least 16 children Mr Ho has fathered with four “wives” are battling for a share of his wealth with all the venom one normally expects after a patriarch’s funeral. Mr Ho is condemned to watch the spectacle while he is still alive. It’s enough to give polygamy a bad name. But the fun and games surrounding Mr Ho’s charming family are but a sideshow to the goings-on in Macao itself. The Portuguese established Macao as a trading post in 1557, some 300 years before Hong Kong became a British colony. Hong Kong’s rise as a financial centre left Macao to specialise in vice: gambling, prostitution and loan-sharking. In the run-up to the 1999 handover to China, Macao remained a seedy place, with street shoot-outs between triad gangs a regular spectacle. Beijing took a strategic decision to clean up Macao. It would also develop it into Asia’s premier gambling destination. Just as Hong Kong is China’s banking centre, so Macao would become its baccarat hub. Both special administrative regions would show Taiwan it was possible to be part of China and free to do one’s own thing. Almost instantly, Macao’s violence ended. So, too, in 2002 did Mr Ho’s monopoly. Two of the new licences went to the kings of Nevada, Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn. When, in 2004, Mr Adelson opened the Sands Macao, there was a stampede to get in. The casino, the first to cater to mass-market Chinese gamblers, paid for itself in eight months. Mr Adelson later added the 3,000-room Venetian Macao hotel and convention centre, the world’s largest casino and one of the few places where you can take an indoor gondola ride. Mr Wynn added a higher-end, more discreet casino that proved equally popular. Macao derives four-fifths of its revenue from gambling (compared with less than half in Las Vegas), the bulk of it from high-rollers. Officially, Chinese citizens are allowed to exchange about $50,000 a year into hard currency. But many high-rollers spend much more than that. They can do so thanks to the so-called junket operators who provide gamblers’ hard-currency stake in return for renminbi-denominated collateral. If the gambler wins, he keeps his hard-currency earnings. If he loses, he pays back in renminbi. Because such loans are not exactly official, and unenforceable in China’s court system, they are collected the old-fashioned way. Analysts covering Macao insist that the bulk of money wagered – estimated by CLSA at $750bn last year – is legitimate gambling. But the opportunity for money laundering is also obvious. Of the debts settled by junket operators, CLSA writes reassuringly: “Note that the numbers of reported assaults or deaths associated with debt collection are surprisingly low.” Beijing may well be hoping that foreign operators can further nudge Macao in the direction of convention business and mass-market gambling. That would make it far less dependent on the volatile, and potentially shady, world of the high-rollers. In the meantime, the former Portuguese colony is riding wave upon wave of money. Last year, its cash-flush government made a “wealth-sharing handout” of $750 to every Macanese. So long as its monopoly lasts, the exact source of gambling revenue may not matter too much. The dice are loaded in Macao’s favour.
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