Just a stone’s throw across a narrow waterway from the world’s largest gambling hub Macau, a former oyster farming island is being transformed into China’s newest tourism haven.

Dubbed by some as China’s answer to Florida’s Orlando — a global tourist magnet with its cluster of major theme parks — Hengqin has seen property prices more than double over the past two years.

While still a dusty mass of construction sites, Hengqin now draws millions annually to its anchor attraction, the “Chimelong Ocean Kingdom” theme park, with a slew of hotel, malls and sprawling residential developments being built nearby.

Spanish soccer club, Real Madrid, announced last week they would open an interactive virtual reality complex in Hengqin, in partnership with Hong Kong-listed developer, Lai Sun Group .

The 12,000-square-meter venue, set to open in 2021, will include virtual reality entertainment and a museum showcasing the club’s history.

​Oysters to Orlando of China

The transformation of Hengqin, which is three times as large as Macau, is part of Beijing’s efforts to bolster links between Hong Kong, Macau and nine cities in the Pearl River Delta region, or so-called “Greater Bay Area,” modeled after other dynamic global bay areas such as Tokyo and San Francisco.

“Hengqin will be the Orlando of China. Macau is Las Vegas (and) Hong Kong is New York,” said Larry Leung, an executive with Lai Sun that is helping build the Real Madrid complex at its “Novotown” project in Hengqin. “Within an hour you can have them all.”

Novotown’s entertainment mix will also feature China’s first Lionsgate movie world with theme rides from blockbuster films such as the Hunger Games and Twilight, as well as a National Geographic educational center. High-end hotel chains and luxury yacht makers are building more hotels and a marina on Hengqin.

​Expanding Macau

Chinese officials see Hengqin helping Macau diversify away from casinos to a more wholesome tourism industry. More than 80 percent of Macau’s public revenues come from the gambling sector.

Businesses in Macau have been encouraged to invest in Hengqin with the government providing cheaper rent and tax subsidies. Galaxy Entertainment, Shun Tak and Macau Legend have also earmarked developments for Hengqin.

Realtors expect property prices to keep rising once a sea bridge linking Hong Kong, and a high-speed rail station are completed.

Hoffman Ma, deputy chairman of Success Universe Group, which operates the Ponte 16 casino in Macau, said Hengqin could take some convention and exhibition business away from the former Portuguese colony.

“It doesn’t make sense for Macau to do that, due to a consistent labor shortage,” he said.

Big population, more theme parks

Wang Lian, from Wuhan in central China, brought his daughter to watch whale sharks and polar bears at Chimelong Ocean Kingdom recently.

Industry reports show 8.5 million people visited China’s top theme park last year, more than Hong Kong Disneyland’s 6.1 million, and almost a third of the 28 million people who visited Macau last year.

“China’s population is so big they need something like this nearby … its (Hengqin’s) economic ties will also help Macau develop,” Wang said.
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When Hurricane Irma hit the Florida Coast, the Islamic Circle of North America arranged shelter. After it passed, they provided relief. Its volunteers — made up of immigrant and nonimmigrant, Muslim and non-Muslims — has opened minds and hearts wherever they go, to their shared desire to give back to the country.
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When Hurricane Irma battered the Florida Coast, volunteers of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) arranged shelter.

After it passed, they provided relief — from flood-damaged homes in Naples to uprooted tree trunk clearings in Cooper City, Florida.

Abdulrauf Khan, a Pakistani immigrant and assistant executive director at ICNA Relief USA — a network of disaster relief and social services — has been through all of it. Anytime a natural calamity strikes, he’s present.

Khan describes his motives as two-fold: a desire to assist his neighbors, while empowering his three children.

“I have a son who is 18 years old,” he begins to recount a vivid memory. “He asked me five years ago, ‘Dad, what have you done for this country?’”

It’s a simple question that would provide clarity to Khan’s mission.

“We have to work and we have to make sure our children feel that ownership of the country,” he said. “We have to give back.”

‘A basic part of the religion’

From Hurricanes Harvey to Irma, there are many Texans who embrace the work of Muslim relief volunteers, and select others who are hesitant to grant their trust, based solely on religion. But regardless of their reception, ICNA answers the call to assist, and changes some minds in the process.

“Charity is a big part of Islam, and giving back to the community is a big part of Islam,” says Aqsa Cheema, administrative coordinator for ICNA Relief South Florida.

Cheema, 22, a generation Pakistani-American who assisted with Irma relief, says she has been in the habit of giving back since she was a kid, attending mosque.

“You go along with it, and you get the chance to distribute food and do things that can benefit the community,” she says. “That’s just a basic part of the religion.”

Open hearts, open arms

Earlier in the week, as Irma’s ruthless winds pounded the state indiscriminately, ICNA facilitated shelter for Floridians — any and all Floridians —  in a Boca Raton-based Islamic Center.

Some of their guests said they had never met a Muslim.

“It was their first experience coming to an Islamic Center,” Khan said. “They felt like, ‘this is what we feel like when we go to church, when we go to synagogue’” — welcome, and at home.

Cheema, who is studying to be a social worker, describes her work as enriching, but never complete.

“That lack of true fulfillment is what keeps me going,” she says.

“I accept the fact that I can’t help everyone, but maybe if I help one person, and someone sees me helping that person, they will be like, ‘Hey, you know what? It felt nice to bring a smile on a person’s face. I can help them too.’”
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Think of it as motorbike banking.

For Vietnamese who live far from a retail bank branch, VietinBank scrambles scooters so its officers can meet clients where they live, tablet in hand.

There’s also the strategy of DongA Bank, which decks out a van with four ATMs and parks it near factories to reach laborers.

All across Vietnam, people are heeding the government’s call for “financial inclusion,” the global buzzword for bringing banks to the masses, and all the better if it can be digital. Hanoi has staked out some national targets for the year 2020, including an ambitious reduction in the share of transactions based on cash, down to a whopping 10 percent.

That goes hand in hand with other targets, like increasing the number of point-of-sales (POS) devices to 300,000, and getting 70 percent of utility payments done electronically.

But most seem to think those will be a tough goal to meet and that cash, the Vietnamese dong, will stay king.

“Cash will not disappear in Vietnam soon,” State Bank of Vietnam payment director Le Anh Dung conceded, even as he’s promoting a cashless society.

But nevertheless, the communist country is seeing a very visible sea change in the digitization of the economy.

Take utilities. To pay for water or power, Vietnamese used to have only the cash option, which meant either stopping in at the post office, or waiting for a collector to ring the doorbell. But now convenience stores from 7-Eleven to Circle K have mushroomed around cities, and with them comes an explosion of POS devices that accept utility payments.

Downsides to branchless banking

But the push toward more sophisticated finance is not all smooth sailing. Customers worry their bank accounts can be hacked, in the same way that thieves can purloin Vietnamese dong stashed in the mattress. Programs that let workers borrow against their salaries to buy phones or fridges risk breeding a culture of debt and consumerism. And citizens have been slow to adopt branchless banking tools like e-wallets Moca, MoMo, and Payoo, which are Vietnam’s answer to PayPal.

“At the moment, the mobile wallet has really taken off — in terms of institutions,” but not so much in terms of customer use, said Kalidas Ghose, CEO of the consumer finance company FE Credit, speaking last week at the Seamless e-commerce conference in Ho Chi Minh City.

At the conference, Dung praised the innovations of global brands like Alibaba’s use of QR codes, Amazon’s one-click pay option, and Uber’s “invisible” transactions, meaning users don’t have to lift a finger and the app charges them instantly after each ride. What the three have in common is to make it close to effortless for customers to hand over their money.

Uber, though, also provides a counter-example of a foreign business adapting to the indigenous reliance on cash in Vietnam. This is one of the few countries where the San Francisco-based company allows riders to pay with hard currency.

Google, similarly, allows people in a number of places, including Vietnam, to make purchases in Google Play through their phone credits.

These are a workaround to keep customers who don’t have debit cards, and they demonstrate the transition that societies undergo on the road to cashless economies.

For Vietnam the transition has been multifaceted.

Vietnam’s financial evolution

About a decade ago, most businesses paid their employees in physical dong. Then policymakers and bankers campaigned to turn that process into direct deposits.

“We encountered huge challenges because everybody wanted salary in cash and thought it was a hassle to use the card,” DongA Bank deputy CEO Nguyen An said. But the bank collaborated with employers and union leaders to change people’s minds.

Then came online retail. Vietnam’s e-commerce market was worth $400,000 in 2015 but will grow to $7.5 billion in 2025, according to a report from Google and Temasek, the Singapore sovereign wealth fund.

Officials are happy to see more people move to the Internet, but they’re not quite as digital as hoped: 89 percent of Vietnam’s online shoppers use cash on delivery, said Dung, who wants more buyers to pay with plastic or wire transfers.

Next in the Southeast Asian country’s financial evolution are plans to digitize public services,so that Vietnamese can pay electronically for hospitals, traffic tolls, schools, and other fees.

After that, locals predict further use of blockchain, the virtual ledger system behind bitcoin. Nicole Nguyen, head of marketing at Infinity Blockchain Labs, expects Vietnam will find applications for agriculture, the internet of things, and financial technology.

“We think that these are the three areas where blockchain can thrive in the next few years,” she said.

For now, mobile banks will continue to roam the cities of Vietnam, searching for customers.

 
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Jim McIngvale was standing in the parking lot of Gallery Furniture, greeting drivers and directing cars as they trickled in one sunny afternoon.

It had been a week and a half since his local furniture store chain opened the doors to its showrooms and offered shelter to hundreds of Houstonians during Hurricane Harvey.

Everyone had since relocated to other shelters, but McIngvale and his employees remained in disaster-relief mode as a long line of men, women and children snaked across the parking lot. On this day, drinking water, cleaning supplies, toiletries, clothing and free pizza were being handed out.

“My parents taught me that the essence of living is giving,” McIngvale said. “That’s who I am, that’s what we do.”

The local businessman and philanthropist is a longtime fixture in the Houston community, and he received national media attention along with an outpouring of public support for his latest efforts.

What about the bottom line?

How businesses respond in times of disaster can either enhance or undermine their public image. But does it affect their bottom line?

McIngvale didn’t seem concerned.

“After this hurricane, we took the people in and we said, ‘to hell with profit, let’s take care of the people,’” McIngvale said. “Profit takes care of itself. If you take care of the people, the people will take care of you.”

“When businesses make public stands and they make public commitments to do good things, consumers take notice,” said Utpal Dholakia, a professor of marketing at Rice University.

According to Dholakia, doing well and doing good don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Businesses are a part of the community in which they operate, and as a result, community members can be seen as stakeholders. Businesses thrive when communities support them and vice versa.

“The company tries to do something good for the community and it actually helps them sell more and also make more money,” Dholakia said.

Employee Juan Rea has worked at Gallery Furniture for more than 30 years and has seen firsthand how McIngvale’s responses over the years have resulted in community members giving back to the business.

Hurricane Harvey evacuees slept on the store’s sofas and mattresses, and later were offered discounts of 20 percent to 40 percent off the same furniture, according to Rea.

“He helps the people and he makes money also,” Rea said.

Or taking advantage

Meanwhile, taking advantage of trying times for the sake of a buck can result in a public relations nightmare.

A local Best Buy electronics store decided to price a case of water at an exorbitant $42.96. After a customer snapped a photo and posted it on Twitter, the resulting public outrage prompted a public apology from company officials.

Why different responses?

In emergency scenarios, why do company responses vary so widely? Dholakia said that can be attributed to differences in management thinking and companies’ corporate cultures.

“Some managers have a very detailed plan of action in place about how to react when something like a hurricane or a similar natural disaster happens. So they’re able to execute their plan of action right away,” Dholakia said. “Other companies react in a slower way because they’re not prepared.”

McIngvale clearly was ready.

“Get prepared, get some sleep,” he told his employees before the hurricane. Rea worked seven consecutive days to aid evacuees, and after a day off, he was ready to keep going.

While it’s hard to quantify how a company’s bottom line benefits from good deeds, Dholakia said giving back can only help boost a brand’s standing in the eyes of its customers.

“It creates a positive knowledge association for the brand, which then feeds into the rest of the things that the customers know about the brand,” Dholakia said.

With so many advertisers vying for our dollars online and offline, good deeds become a way to rise above the noise.

“It is harder and harder to gain consumer attention in this fragmented media landscape,” Dholakia said. “Suddenly, you do something positive for the community and everyone is talking about it.”
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During natural disasters, why do some companies open their doors to the community while others take advantage of its members? Tina Trinh explores the reasons why businesses react the way they do and the cost to their public image.
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One of China’s biggest bitcoin exchanges says it will end trading after news reports that regulators have ordered all Chinese exchanges to close caused the price of the digital currency to plunge.

BTC China said on its website it will “stop all trading business” Sept. 30. The exchange said it was acting in the spirit of a central bank ban last week on initial coin offerings but gave no indication it received a direct order to close.

The central bank has not responded to questions about the currency’s future in China.

There was no immediate word from other Chinese bitcoin exchanges about their plans.

Bitcoin’s value tumbled 15 percent Thursday to about $3,300. The famously volatile currency has shed about a third of its value since Sept. 1 but is up from about $600 a year ago.

Bitcoin surged in popularity in China last year as its price rose. Trading dwindled after regulators tightened controls and warned the currency might be linked to fraud.

Bitcoin is created and exchanged without the involvement of banks or governments. Transactions allow anonymity, which has made bitcoin popular with people who want to conceal their activity. Bitcoin can be converted to cash when deposited into accounts at prices set in online trading.

A Chinese business news magazine, Caixin, said at one point up to 90 percent of global trading took place in China.
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Radio Free Asia has joined the ranks of media outlets shuttered under the now almost blanket smothering of an independent press in Cambodia, as U.S. and European diplomatic efforts have failed, so far, to halt the county’s descent into authoritarianism ahead of elections next year.

The closure of the U.S.-funded outlet, due to what it called intimidation, represents another escalation in opposition to Washington by Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Conciliatory overtones made in a news conference Tuesday by U.S. Ambassador William Heidt have failed to halt the government’s campaign to paint Washington as the masterminds of a vast conspiracy involving all major opponents of the government.

“These are extraordinary allegations. The business of diplomacy is normally carried out with careful and respectful language, the kind of language I’m going to use today. Difficult messages are delivered privately first. Friendly nations seek ways to bridge differences,” he told reporters.

Two days later, the government mouthpiece Fresh News posted an article declaring the United States “should take a helicopter to transport its citizens from Cambodia, as it did in April 1975.”

Having spent billions of dollars promoting a stable, nominally democratic Cambodia, the United States and the European Union now have only a beleaguered opposition to show for it. The party’s leader, Kem Sokha, was arrested this month in connection with Washington’s alleged grand plan.

“Basically, after tens of billions of dollars invested in Cambodia, we’re back where we were 25 years ago … the more things changed, the more they actually stayed the same,” said Sophal Ear, author of Aid Dependence in Cambodia: How Foreign Assistance Undermines Democracy.

China’s deep pockets are often cited as an unstoppable force whittling away Western leverage in Cambodia, and Beijing has offered public support for Cambodia’s arrest of Sokha.

Returning from China on Wednesday, Hun Sen praised Beijing as “a strong backer who continues to help Cambodia in all circumstance, which no foreign [countries] can break.”

But Cambodia’s economic entanglements are far more complicated than mere aid contributions, and as tension with Western powers intensifies, drastic measures that would be considered unthinkable under normal circumstances could come into play.

Access to markets

Aid to Cambodia is measured in millions of dollars, but export markets are measured in the billions.

The United States is its biggest individual country export market at $3.5 billion, or 22 percent of the total, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), an online resource for economic data. China accounts for just 4.4 percent.

Cambodia also benefits handsomely from preferential access to European markets, with its exports there rising from just above $595 million in 2006 to about $5.25 billion in 2016 — under a scheme that has both labor and human rights clauses. In comparison, Cambodia has an enormous trade deficit with China of around $3 billion, OEC data show.

The EU has withdrawn a country’s access to these markets three times: from Sri Lanka in 2010 for human rights violations carried out during that country’s civil war, from Myanmar in 1997 for forced labor and from Belarus in 2007 for failing to respect the basic rights of trade unions.

“What could trigger such a procedure is a serious and systematic violation of one of the listed fundamental human rights or labor rights conventions,” an EU spokesperson told VOA.

So while it is true that Chinese foreign investment in and aid to Cambodia increased dramatically — in 2015 its foreign direct investment eclipsed all other countries combined at around $1 billion — the assertion that the West’s relationships with Phnom Penh are rendered meaningless as a result is not the full picture.

“The last thing Hun Sen would want would be to provoke the U.S., whether the Congress, White House or U.S. trade representative, to raise Cambodia’s market access to the United States. Unrest by textile workers would destabilize the Hun Sen regime and provide grist for the opposition mill,” said Carl Thayer, an emeritus professor at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

There are more than 700,000 registered garment workers in Cambodia in an industry heavily reliant on Western markets.

Bigger fish to fry

Some are interpreting new U.S. visa restrictions on Cambodians as a punitive measure. But other than that and the usual statements expressing concern and urging transparency, the response in the West has been muted, especially in Washington.

“I can only surmise that the State Department is in disarray with the new Trump administration, a new secretary of state with little experience in diplomacy, vacancies at the senior level, and impending budget cuts,” Thayer said.

“There has been no response by the Trump administration to Hun Sen’s cancellation of military exercises with the U.S. earlier this year. Since Trump’s Afghanistan speech, in which he nixed nation-building and democracy promotion, who at State will take any initiative against Hun Sen?” Thayer asked.

Trump has also abandoned U.S. participation in one of the State Department’s sharpest diplomatic tools in Asia, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.

Meanwhile, higher priorities are bountiful, even in Asia.

“Whether we like it or not, Cambodia is not one of the so-called hot spots of global politics. The international community’s focus is on countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan or Myanmar,” said Barbara Lochbihler, vice chair for the European Parliament’s Human Rights Committee.
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Your afternoon chocolate bar may be fueling climate change, destroying protected forests and threatening elephants, chimpanzees and hippos in West Africa, research suggests.

Well-known brands, such as Mars and Nestle, are buying through global traders cocoa that is grown illegally in dwindling national parks and reserves in Ivory Coast and Ghana, environmental group Mighty Earth said.

“Every consumer of chocolate is a part of either the problem or the solution,” Etelle Higonnet, campaign director at Mighty Earth, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“You can choose to buy ethical chocolate. Or you’re voting with your dollar for deforestation.”

Mars and Nestle told the Thomson Reuters Foundation they are working to tackle deforestation.

“We take a responsible approach to sourcing cocoa and have committed to source 100 percent certified sustainable cocoa by 2020,” Mars said in an email.

Both companies have committed to join the Cocoa and Forests Initiative, a major effort to end deforestation in the global cocoa supply chain, launched in March.

“We will be working to ensure human rights are given a high priority alongside the environmental aims of this initiative,” Nestle said in emailed comments.

Conversion to plantations

Almost one-third of 23 protected natural areas in Ivory Coast that researchers visited in 2015 had been almost entirely converted to illegal cocoa plantations, the report said.

Researchers said the practice is so widespread that villages of tens of thousands of people, along with churches and schools, have sprung up in national parks to support the cocoa economy.

Ivory Coast, Francophone West Africa’s biggest economy, is the world’s top cocoa grower.

While the bulk of its 1 million cocoa farmers ply their trade legally, Washington-based Mighty Earth estimates about a third of cocoa is grown illegally in protected areas.

Deforestation for cocoa happens in sight of authorities and chocolate traders are aware of it, they said.

Loss of natural forests is problematic because they act as a home for the region’s wildlife and a key weapon against climate change, absorbing carbon dioxide — a major driver of climate change — as they grow.

Available land for new cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast ran out long ago, so farmers have moved into parks and reserves, taking advantage of a decade of political crisis that ended in 2011.

Ivory Coast’s now has about 2.5 million hectares (6 million acres) of natural forest, a fifth of what it had at independence in 1960, according to European Union figures. Most of the losses have been caused by expanding agriculture.

The government has struggled to evict farmers from forest reserves amid accusations in 2013 of human rights abuses by security forces.

Details of the Cocoa and Forests Initiative, which is initially focusing on Ivory Coast and Ghana, will be announced by November’s global climate talks in Bonn.
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More than 50 local and national charities have raised more than $350 million in the nearly three weeks since Hurricane Harvey struck the Texas Gulf Coast, and the disparate groups are trying to decide on priorities while some storm victims still await help.

Distrust of large charities such as the American Red Cross has driven many donors to smaller, local organizations. For instance, Houston Texans football star J.J. Watt has raised more than $30 million for his foundation, an effort he started by posting appeals on social media.

One donor to Watt’s effort, Helen Vasquez, stood outside the Texans’ stadium and said she had seen a Facebook post listing the salaries of executives at top national charities. She gave Watt $20 instead.

“It’s all going to the people itself and not to the corporations, not the higher-ups in the corporations,” Vasquez said.

But most of the money raised for Harvey has gone to the Red Cross, which has raised a least $211 million. The rest went to other organizations, including 40 groups listed by Charity Navigator, as well as dozens of other groups and individual families raising money on do-it-yourself sites such as GoFundMe.

More than $50 million has poured into the local fund set up by Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, the county’s chief administrative official.

Turner and Emmett openly urge donors to give to the local fund and not the Red Cross, saying doing so will ensure the best use of the money.

Emmett has blamed the Red Cross for problems that arose with setting up and running the emergency shelters used by tens of thousands of people who were flooded out of their homes.

The Greater Houston Community Foundation, which the men have asked to administer the fund, is creating a 12-member board and a grant committee to set priorities and distribute donations starting in the next several weeks. The foundation is working with the United Way and dozens of other charities, but so far not with the Red Cross or with Watt, who did not respond to questions sent through a spokesman for the Texans.

David Brady, CEO of the Red Cross of the Texas Gulf Coast, said his group would be “happy to be a part of all conversations” and that the Red Cross would review how it could improve its shelter operations in the future.

“We can’t take the criticisms personally,” he said.

The foundation’s CEO, Stephen Maislin, said it will pay the costs of running the Harvey relief fund on its own, including the credit card fees banks charge for donations.

The charities are still weighing the best ways to use the money and setting up systems to monitor where the money goes. Veterans of other major disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, say coordination between groups is critical to make the most out of every dollar.

Reese May, national director of recovery for the home rebuilding group SBP, said local leaders need to bridge the gaps between the dozens of groups by setting clear goals.

“When there is aggressive leadership, when there are aggressive goals that are publicly set, it plants the flag,” May said. “It gives neighbors the opportunity to connect with one another, saying, ‘Absolutely, we’re going to make it back from this.'”

Among the most critical needs is figuring out housing for thousands of people who are still living in emergency shelters, many of whom are not eligible for federal assistance. Others lost everything in their homes, and some people are living in gutted homes flooded by sewage because they have nowhere else to go.

The people involved in fundraising say they must move quickly and coordinate with each other.

“I’m praying we can stretch it,” said Anna Babin, head of the United Way of Greater Houston, which is already issuing grants to people needing help with rent and lost vehicles and cleaning out flooded homes. “But this is so significant.”

As the Texans played their first game of the season Sunday, around 1,900 evacuees were inside the NRG Center, the convention center across the street from the stadium. Thousands of NFL fans were tailgating in nearby parking lots, and smoke from sausages and chicken on the grill rose in the air.

Estella Martin and several other people said they wanted answers from the groups raising money on their behalf.

“They got enough to put every one of the people that are still here in a home or an apartment and help them out until they get up on their feet,” Martin said. “Instead, they’ve got us here.”
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