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Progress on Taiwan’s casino gaming project has been painfully slow

Things often move slowly in Taiwan politics. A plan for casino gaming within Taiwan’s borders—on Penghu—was first presented as far back as 1993, when Dr Stanley Ho was still the undisputed king of neighbouring Macau’s casino industry and liberalisation of the Macau market wasn’t even a flicker of a pipe dream. In the best case scenario Taiwan might finally see a casino built by 2013—a mere twenty years after the idea was first mooted.

“The Offshore Islands Development Act has received most media attention, but actually the government is using the Isolated Islands Construction Act to legalise casinos,” says Simon Liu, Director of Business Development for Jumbo Technology, a leading Taiwanese supplier of gaming equipment to the domestic and international markets.

What sort of casino industry will Taiwan create? It’s a long time since the heady days of the early Noughties when senior American gaming bosses came courting the Taiwan government regarding possible integrated resorts. At that time—before the ending of Dr Ho’s Macau monopoly and before the Las Vegas operators had started their investment in Macau—Taiwan arguably had an exciting window of opportunity to create a world class and region-leading casino gaming sector. Whether in reality regional politics would have allowed Taiwan to market such an industry to Mainland Chinese visitors is a moot point. Only in July last year—for the first time since the end of China’s civil war in 1949—did Beijing agree to direct flights between the Mainland and what it regards as a renegade province.

Cross-straits harmony

The political mood music is certainly more encouraging then it has been for a long time when it comes to the possibility of bringing in Mainland tourists to Taiwan for casino gaming. Relations between China and Taiwan have thawed considerably since President Ma Ying-jeou was elected in March last year in place of the pro-independence hard liner Chen Shui-bian. President Chen’s policy position appeared essentially to be to set his face against any overture Beijing was inclined to make—from a gift of giant pandas to bilateral talks on trade.

The fact that President Ma is leader of the Kuomintang (KMT)—the Nationalist Party of China historically most opposed to the People’s Republic of China—appears paradoxically to give him more wiggle room than his predecessor when negotiating with Beijing. This is probably because as the heir to Chiang Kai-shek’s political legacy President Ma has less to prove to the public regarding his commitment to Taiwan as a going concern.

President Ma has hit a few bumps in the road recently in his rapprochement with Beijing, but he has a thumping parliamentary majority. The casino plan is unlikely therefore to be derailed by the threat of individual MPs or even blocs of MPs defying the government whip on the issue.