Gambling is illegal in China, but that doesn’t prevent Chinese gamblers from betting tens of thousands of dollars online.
Chinese workers on break outside an office building in Pasay City, Philippines. By some estimates, at least 100,000 people from mainland China have moved to Manila for jobs as gambling company marketing agents, tech support specialists and engineers.
Operating safely out of reach of Chinese authorities, the lottery website and its agents are based hundreds of miles away in the Philippines. Those figures also include traditional casinos, which have gotten their own boost from rising tourism from China. “Everybody is after the Chinese customer because they’re the biggest market and they’re the biggest gamblers,” said Rosalind Wade, the Manila-based managing director of Asia Gaming Brief, a research and consulting firm.
Over the last decade, the country has built some of the region’s largest casino resorts, none bigger than those located along Manila Bay in a development called Entertainment City. But the biggest bets were being placed remotely. Using computer tablets and headsets to communicate with gamblers watching from abroad on cameras, Mandarin-speaking female employees readied stacks of chips each worth more than $19,000 and waited patiently for instructions.
The online boom was set in motion when Duterte signed Executive Order No. 13 in 2016, stripping two small regional economic agencies of the authority to issue offshore gambling licenses and handing it to the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp., which is both a national regulator and a gambling operator.
The faster the industry grows, the more it needs workers with the language skills and cultural know-how to indulge Chinese gamblers.Eventually, that labor pool ran dry. Companies grew desperate and started recruiting outside train stations in China, where migrant job seekers would gather.Nearly all in their early 20s, the workers are lured to the Philippines with lofty salaries and benefits such as free accommodations, meals and flights home.
The appearance of so many college-aged foreigners makes some local residents uneasy. Philippine professionals complain about the workers being rowdy, their penchant for smoking and their lack of English. Others scoff that some of the newest high-paying jobs in the Philippines are going to foreigners while millions of Filipinos continue to have to go overseas to seek employment.
Some gambling operators, scrambling to find office space and apartments for their workers, are providing a year’s worth of rent in advance, according to DavidThe Chinese presence, he said, is helping beckon investors from China and other parts of Southeast Asia.
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