It is a no-frills operation at the Lisboa, one of Macau's best-known casinos, and the tired decor seems to have changed little since it was showcased in the 1974 James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun.

For decades, this was Macau's gaming scene -- monopolised by 88-year-old tycoon Stanley Ho -- until it opened to foreign competition in 2002.

A stream of Las Vegas-based gaming companies flooded into the former Portuguese colony, hoping to cash in on what promised to be a massive market of gambling-mad visitors from nearby Hong Kong and mainland China.

The newcomers built ostentatious casino hotels with thousands of rooms, dwarfing Macau's older venues. Money poured into the once sleepy city of half a million people and now gambling revenues have overtaken those in Las Vegas.

But the plan to transform Macau from Asia's seedy gambling den into a Vegas-style family entertainment hub has not matched its gaming success.

"It is the early stages of the whole entertainment offering in Macau," Davis Fong, director of the University of Macau's Institute for the Study of Commercial Gaming, told AFP.

"It's going to take some time for tourists and locals to accept it."

Lingering doubts about the idea re-ignited last month when Las Vegas Sands chairman Sheldon Adelson complained that ticket sales for the Cirque de Soleil show ZAIA at his Venetian hotel were "disappointing."

Adelson said Cirque de Soleil promised to "improve the show or replace it."

The world-renowned act, which usually plays to capacity crowds, was the linchpin in Macau's plan to become an entertainment and gaming hub.

The Montreal-based company disputes the accuracy of Adelson's comments, but said drawing a local Chinese audience to the show -- a mixture of dance and acrobatics set to music -- has been a challenge.

"ZAIA is the first and the only show of its kind in this unique market," spokeswoman Renee-Claude Menard said in an e-mail to AFP.

"There is no entertainment 'tradition' in Macau which makes the challenge even greater. It therefore requires very distinctive marketing approaches to ensure its success."

Menard said Cirque is making adjustments to the show, but "there has never been a question of replacing ZAIA."

By contrast, Cirque de Soleil has been a hit in Las Vegas.

Despite its label as America's Sin City, the Nevada desert metropolis offers a host of family-rated entertainment and top acts, including comedian Jerry Seinfeld, magician Criss Angel and singer Celine Dion. She finished a five-year nightly performance at the Caesars Palace in 2007.

Apart from attracting some local talent, Macau's sparse entertainment offerings include a few burlesque shows and a tacky harbourfront theme park.

A plan to build a version of the Playboy Mansion in Macau has reportedly been shelved while most casino operators remain conservative in their plans for new entertainment venues.

One hurdle is that Macau's 23-million annual visitors stay an average of 1.5 days, less than the average three to four night stay in Las Vegas.

"When someone spends three or four days in a place, they'll have a whole bunch of time to spend on other activities rather than just gambling," said Aaron Fischer, director of consumer and gaming research at brokerage CLSA.

"If you're only in Macau for one and a half days, most people are quite happy to spend that time gambling."

Even spending at the city's retail shops has fallen short of expectations.

"That is the easiest area to do well, but it hasn't," Fischer said.

It will take at least five or 10 years for the non-gaming business to reach an "acceptable level," if it happens at all, Fischer said.

Macau's success at the gambling tables is also its own worst enemy.

The city's government has worried aloud about social problems attached to a gambling economy, rising rent prices for local residents and youths dropping out of school to take casino jobs.

Meanwhile, alarmed at the amount of money that mainland Chinese were spending, Beijing clamped down last year by limiting the number of visits they could make to Macau.

Those restrictions have been relaxed, but are likely to return as Beijing moves to stem the city's runaway, gambling-driven, 29 percent annual growth, Fischer said.

In fact, the promise to turn Macau into an entertainment hub is largely aimed at placating Beijing and the city's government, rather than a hedge in case gaming revenues hit a rough patch, he added.

"It keeps the government happy," Fischer said.

"They won't close down Cirque de Soleil. The cost of the show is immaterial compared to the gambling revenues at The Venetian. It's a sideshow."

earlier related report
Macau marks a decade of Chinese rule
Macau (AFP) Dec 20, 2009 - Macau on Sunday marked 10 years of Chinese rule, capping a decade that has seen its transformation from seedy colonial backwater to global gaming hub rivalling the Las Vegas Strip.

The enclave was returned to China in 1999 following more than four centuries of Portuguese rule. Since then, visitor numbers have sky-rocketed and the city has reaped the financial rewards.

And like nearby Hong Kong, the former British colony that was handed back to China in 1997, Macau has a separate constitution guaranteeing freedoms not available to Chinese on the mainland.

But that has not been enough to satisfy everyone.

As a new chief executive for the territory was sworn in at a ceremony attended by Chinese President Hu Jintao on Sunday, hundreds of residents rallied in a city-centre park to demand cleaner government.

Many of the protesters complained about shady land deals between officials and developers.

"It is a sad day for us. Ten years after the handover, many ordinary citizens here still can't have their own flat because property prices are out of their reach," taxi driver Tang Po-yin told AFP.

"Developers, on the other hand, can buy land from the government for almost nothing."

Beijing largely controls political appointments in the glitzy entertainment city, as it does in Hong Kong, but unlike the former British territory, Macau does not have a strong pro-democracy movement.

However, Hong Kong campaigners used the opportunity of Hu's visit to make their voices heard. Five activists travelled to the city to petition to Hu to release mainland political dissidents, but two of them were blocked from entering the enclave.

Richard Tsoi, one of the pair, said he was cornered by six or seven customs officers, while his peer fell down to the floor amid the pull-and-push at the ferry terminal after their arrival Hong Kong.

"We were told our entry would affect public order in Macau," said Tsoi, who was denied entry to Macau on Sunday.

Immigration officials on Saturday turned away another 14 Hong Kong activists customs for "security reasons" while two journalists were also denied entry.

Most of the changes since the handover have been economic.

In 10 years, the city has risen from a crime-ridden gambling den to a gaming haven with 31 casinos, overtaking Las Vegas and Atlantic City combined in terms of casino revenues as foreign and locally owned resorts sprang up.

The turning point came in 2002, when the government liberalised the market, ending mogul Stanley Ho's four-decade monopoly and attracting big-name international operators, including Steve Wynn and Sheldon Adelson.

The city of 540,000 people is the only place on Chinese soil where casino gambling is allowed. The annual gross revenue from gaming activities jumped from 5.5 billion US dollars 2004 to 14 billion dollars in 2008.

The government has recorded more than 20 million annual visitor arrivals to Macau in recent years, most of them mainland Chinese short-stayers who go more for the casinos than the city's UNESCO world heritage sites.

But the heavy reliance on gaming is proving to be a concern.

"The lucrative business in gaming does not necessarily benefit the local economy in the long run because the foreign casino operators can just grab the money and go," said Gabriel Chan, a gaming analyst at Credit Suisse.

Unlike the gaming sector's breakneck growth, development on the political front has been slow.

A 300-member body mostly picked by Beijing selects Macau's chief executive, while fewer than half of the city's 29 lawmakers are directly elected.

Progress toward democracy lags behind Hong Kong by at least 50 years, Au Kam-san, a lawmaker and organiser of Sunday's rally in the city park, told AFP.

"We do not have properly formed political parties," he said. "We often saw tens of thousands of Hong Kong people taking to the street demanding universal suffrage -- it's hard for me to imagine that happening here."

While senior officials have pledged to clean up government, critics say much more needs to be done.

In April, Macau's highest court sentenced a former minister to 28 years in jail for taking kickbacks from contractors in construction projects.

But the high-profile case is "only the tip of the iceberg," said legislator Jose Coutinho, who described corruption among government officials and businessmen as "rampant".

Andrew Tang, a waiter, said Macau's return to Chinese rule did not make much difference to his life.

"Macau has always been in the hands of a small group of power brokers," he said. "We as ordinary citizens do not speak out or protest because we know it won't make any difference."

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