Cambodia goes all-in on China in casino port city

SIHANOUKVILLE, CAMBODIA: Between Sihanoukville’s beaches and its multiplying casinos, ‘Lao Qi’ and Bun Saroeun run restaurants barely a hundred dusty metres apart.

But their fortunes could not be more different.

For while Lao Qi is riding the Chinese boom that brought him and thousands of others from China to the Cambodian resort, Bun Saroeun’s business was built on low-budget Western visitors.

It is far less profitable and now he faces eviction.

Sihanoukville starkly illustrates how Cambodia’s ever tightening relationship with China is transforming the country.

Just as China’s aid and investment have helped Prime Minister Hun Sen defy Western criticism of a crackdown on his opponents, they are also binding Cambodia’s economy ever more closely to China’s.

Sihanoukville, which has Cambodia’s only deep-water port, was carved out of the jungle in the 1960s and named after former King Norodom Sihanouk.

Once a playground for Cambodia’s elite, it fell on hard times during the Khmer Rouge genocide and conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s before becoming a stop for backpackers and other Westerners looking for sun, sea, sand and – for some – sex.

But a steady trickle of Chinese money into its casinos has now swelled to a tide that promises to remodel a city touted by developers as the first port of call on China’s ‘Belt and Road’.

“This is like China 20 years ago. The opportunity is huge,” said Lao Qi, 33, who goes by his nickname and first moved here from China’s Zhejiang province to work in a casino.

His noodles and fried rice can now make him hundreds of dollars a day. Down the road at the Ecstatic Pizza restaurant, 59-yearold Bun Saroeun counts himself lucky to make over US$ 100 a day. — Reuters