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When land facilities in the remote Mong La area of Myanmar (formally Burma) close, an alternative rises....
Live-over-the-Internet gambling services accessible by Chinese online gamblers are taking shape in a remote Myanmar region close to China, reports the Asia Times Online this week.
The new facilities are the brainchild of the local warlord and are centred around the 'mini-Vegas' town of Mong La in Special Region 4, formerly a fave for Chinese folks with a gambling itch that needed scratching. Situated opposite the town of Dalou in China's Yunnan province, Mong La in the 1990s established itself as a Chinese tourism hub for gambling, but times have been hard for the past year or more following fierce Chinese clampdowns on citizens visiting the jungle casinos.
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According to people familiar with the situation, China briefly sent a small number of troops into the remote region to enforce the travel bans and pressure casino operators to close down their operations. At one point, Chinese officials threatened to cut Mong La's power supply, which is provided by Yunnan-based electricity generators.
That hasn't deterred Lin Mingxian, more widely known by the alias Sai Leun, the town's overlord, who currently commands a 2 000-3 000-strong militia known as the National Democratic Alliance Army (NDAA). Sai Leun is believed to have financed much of the city's gambling infrastructure in the late 1990s.
The militia leader is now aggressively expanding his enterprise into online gaming, a fast-growing multibillion-US-dollar global industry that is just now catching on in China. On April 27 this year, Sai Leun presided over the opening of seven new Internet-enabled "live-over-the-Internet" gambling facilities, specifically designed and outfitted for online China-based gamers.
Another 14 gambling venues are being carved out of the jungle about 16 kilometers southwest of Mong La, set idyllically among paddy fields and wandering water buffalo.
Investigating the new business, Asia Times Online found a newly built casino completely surrounded by tropical forest.
Inside the two-story stucco-encrusted building, black leather chairs are arranged around immaculate baccarat tables. Suspended above the tables are cameras connected to the Internet, which allow for scores of remote Chinese gamblers to play their hands.
From the comfort of their homes in Beijing, Kunming or Shanghai, Chinese gamblers can watch the tables via a live video feed over the Internet and place their bets through agents on location at the jungle casinos. The arrangement, says the casino operator, allows the players and casino operators to circumvent recent Chinese efforts to prevent the outflow of cash into Myanmar's black markets.
Online players inside China transfer funds into the casino operators' China-based bank accounts. Once the transfer is confirmed, a player logs on to the casino's website and watches the game from the cameras above the tables via high-speed Internet while communicating with his agent via mobile phone. When the hand is played out, the remote player can opt to have winnings wired to his account or alternatively order the agent to get the cash physically from the casino.
New online casinos recently opened at nearby Wan Hsieo, Mong Ma and the tract outside Mong La are able to handle similar financial traffic, meaning total daily turnover at Myanmar's online casinos could be as high as $20 million. The operator said investors in mainland China, Hong Kong and Thailand had contributed funds to the new casinos.
The popular Sai Luen is not one to take a power cut threat lying down either, it seems. The warlord, who was formerly a Communist Party of Burma army commander has taken precautions against future disruptions to his gambling businesses - particularly from China. To preempt a threatened power cut, he ordered the construction of a power plant in a converted sugarcane refinery, which became operational one year ago and is capable of independently supplying 30 000 kilowatts of power, well beyond the town's current needs. Mong La's telecommunication infrastructure, however, is still controlled by China, which could represent a pressure point on the casino's Internet connections.
Sai Leun is immensely popular in his autonomous area, in part because of his unilateral decision to exempt locals from paying taxes. He reportedly said during the April 27 opening of the new casinos, "The only burden you will continue to bear is supplying us with new recruits for our army."
Sai Leun, casino operators reckon, has negotiated assurances from Yunnan officials against another Chinese crackdown on his new-fangled gambling operations.
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