Neoliberal exception? The liberalization of Macau’s casino gaming monopoly and the genealogy of the post-socialist Chinese subject

Abstract

Following Portugal’s return of Macau to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, the local government liberalized the city’s casino gaming monopoly and opened the industry to foreign investment. As a result, Macau has become the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming revenue, and a model for other regional states which are pursuing casino gaming-driven development. This article entails a post-structural analysis of neoliberal governance in Macau and a genealogy of the resulting post-socialist consumer subject. Framed by a critical engagement with Aihwa Ong’s theory of “neoliberalism as exception,” analysis reveals that Macau’s economic growth was enhanced, not by optimizing technocratic rationalities, but by reactive measures taken up by different actors, at several different scales, to address three governance crises of public order, public finance, and public health. What appear to be neoliberal interventions in the Macau economy are often exposed as contemporary iterations of latent governmental forms. These various factors form a dispositif, or apparatus, of subjectification.