Ten Years of the "International Tourism Island": Who Does Hainan Actually Want?

After the property boom faded, Hainan still looks like an isolated island.

At the start, Hainan broke away to become a province of its own, and China's largest special economic zone. For the first dozen years or so, it hoped to become Taiwan. For the dozen years after that, "international tourism island" became the new hope, and it seemed to have eyes only for Macau — whenever "international" and "tourism" came up, people daydreamed about casinos or horse racing, about rich people from around the world coming here to burn off their surplus money, hormones or whatever else. Even after tourism industries everywhere had set their sights on China's tour-group aunties, Hainan never gave up that international ambition.

In short: bring the world's rich people here. Preferably not people from the Northeast.

So they shouted a lot of slogans, presumably held a lot of meetings, rolled out a lot of policies. In the end, all of it turned into good news for real estate.

Over the ten years of promoting the "international tourism island," Hainan's average home price province-wide rose from 6,291 yuan per square meter in 2009 to 11,380 yuan per square meter in 2017. By April this year, when the Boao Forum for Asia convened, the average price in Sanya had reached 35,000 yuan per square meter.

"Hainan people's thinking is fairly backward… it's an isolated island, your information isn't as quick as other people's," is how Lu Yuecheng, a Hainan native, describes his birthplace.

The "isolated island" Lu Yuecheng means was traditionally where the Li and Miao peoples lived, with 60% of the population working the land. Pan Shiyi once described Hainan in the 1980s, just after it became a province, as "a dirty, smelly, chaotic place that didn't even have electricity."

Hainan split from Guangdong to become a province in 1988, and as late as 1997 its economic growth rate was still last in the country.

For 30 years, other than "special economic zone," what Hainan is has stayed vague.

Lu Yuecheng has spent most of his life watching this island change. Since 1988, Hainan has been through ten Party secretaries and nine governors. Across those 30 years it has kept looking for a definition of itself, and one important part of that search has been the question of what kind of people the island wants to attract.

International Tourism Island

In early 2000, Hainan made its first attempt.

China's formal entry into the WTO in 2001 gave Hainan a jolt of urgency: as a special economic zone, its advantage in openness weakened immediately. Du Qinglin, then the province's Party secretary, argued that "Hainan must shift from opening by region to opening by industry."

As China's only tropical island, the industry Hainan chose to open was tourism. Chi Fulin, president of the China Institute for Reform and Development, floated the concept of an "international tourism island" around 2000; at that point the idea was built mainly on "visa-free entry, zero tariffs, and open aviation rights."

Nine years later the State Council took up Chi Fulin's proposal. On December 31, 2009, it issued "Several Opinions on Promoting the Development and Construction of the Hainan International Tourism Island" (hereafter, "the Opinions"). Hainan would aim to have inbound visitors make up more than 20% of the province's tourist arrivals by 2018, and foreign-exchange tourism revenue more than 30% of total tourism revenue. By 2028 those two figures were to rise to 30% and 40%.

"The international tourism island policy was like injecting a shot of hormones into Hainan's economy — everyone was guessing what the result would be," Xie Xiangxiang, then secretary-general of the Sanya Tourism Association, once said.

The result was surprising and entirely predictable at the same time: after the international tourism island policy came out, Hainan had a property boom.

The Financial Times once reported that driving up house prices in Hainan — or anywhere — takes only three things: a scarce product, a forward-looking story, and buyers from out of town. Hainan in 2010 had all three. Every selling point in Hainan property was the sea: sea views, bays, sea breezes. The international tourism island offered limitless possibilities for the province's future. And homes in Haikou and Sanya had already become the property of outsiders, out of reach for locals.

A property boom after the international tourism island policy was unavoidable.

Chi Fulin, though, saw a deeper cause: Hainan's real economy was weak and its tourism base too thin. Making money from tourism investment requires large amounts of capital up front, and domestic capital at the time was not big enough for that. So corporate money that flowed into Hainan all went into property instead, because property paid fast and paid well.

Property thus became Hainan's barometer, registering market sentiment in real time. Every time the province announced a new policy, the property industry reacted first.

Five days after the Opinions were published, commercial housing transactions across Hainan totaled 17.112 billion yuan — more than the province's entire commercial housing transaction volume for 2008.

In mid-January 2010, Sanya signed contracts for 1,625 homes in ten days, at an average price of 20,500 yuan per square meter.

Two months later, prices in Sanya and Haikou were up 50% on the year, five times the national rate.

"The government didn't control it, so huge numbers of mainland companies came to Hainan, grabbed projects and built them fast," says Gao Yuxi, chief operating officer at a Hainan developer, who watched the international-tourism-island fever up close.

The scene was familiar. "What you were doing was driving up market prices; everyone was investing," Pan Shiyi said of Hainan's 1992 property boom. "It would have been stupid not to get into a rising market."

In 2009 Hainan's "rising market" appeared again. That year development investment came close to the previous year's entire fiscal revenue, reaching 31.663 billion yuan.

The boom even produced "taking land from the sea." Since the international tourism island was first proposed, Hainan has reclaimed 12 artificial islands covering more than 70,000 mu (about 4,700 hectares), among them Evergrande's Ocean Flower Island, Sunac's Sun and Moon Bay, and Dongjiao Coconut Grove.

In 2010 Sanya finished Phoenix Island, five landmark towers built on reclaimed land. The first two were sold as serviced apartments; all 700 units went in a single day, at prices reaching 150,000 yuan per square meter, making it "Hainan's most expensive development."

Thanks to that "excessive" property development, one year after the international tourism island policy Hainan's provincial GDP reached 205.2 billion yuan, up 15.8% on the year — the fastest growth and the biggest jump in output of any recent year.

Everything looked to be roaring along. None of it was what an "international tourism island" was supposed to be.

Set Aside "International" — Even "Tourism Island" Is a Stretch

Hainan tried plenty of things to build its international tourism island, but every step was small and cautious.

As early as 2000, Hainan gave citizens of 21 countries 15 days of visa-free entry as tourists. After the international tourism island policy, that number rose only to 26. Not until May 1 this year did the State Council widen the list to 59 countries and extend the waiver from tour groups to individual travelers.

Compare the neighbors: Bali is visa-free for 140 countries, Jeju Island for 180, and the Maldives for every country except India and Brunei.

A planned road-and-rail bridge across the Qiongzhou Strait, to connect Hainan with Guangdong, was shelved because it was too hard to build. The plan switched to an undersea tunnel across the strait, budgeted at 100 billion yuan and due for completion in 2020. Engineering problems and a funding shortage mean work has still not started.

A 28-square-kilometer airport being built on reclaimed land in Sanya was halted on July 25, 2017, over suspected illegal use of marine areas.

In other words: after the property boom faded, Hainan still looks like an isolated island.

On April 20, 2011, Hainan added a duty-free policy for departing travelers, opening one downtown duty-free store each in Haikou and Sanya. As with the visa waiver, it copied the concept without carrying it through.

Sanya's downtown duty-free store, for instance, has the basic categories — cosmetics, bags, perfume — but very few brands to choose from: seven brands in bags, while top international names such as Shiseido, Dior and Chanel are limited to sunglasses and perfume.

Nearly ten years after the "international tourism island" policy, Hainan is still far from the international feel it set out to have.

Hainan has 59 international flights a week. Phuket has 402 and Jeju has 310. Bali has 840 — and Hainan Island is six times the size of Bali.

At the end of 2017, 98% of the tourists Hainan drew were Chinese. The absolute number of inbound foreign visitors was small, and its growth was slowing.

But foreign visitor numbers are only the tip of the problem. Hainan's pull as a destination is weak in substance: set "international" aside, and it is hard to call it a real tourism island either.

Between 2009 and 2016, tourism's share of Hainan's GDP rose from 6.4% to 7.7%. The target set ten years ago, when the international tourism island was launched, was 20%. Tourism accounts for 50% of GDP in Bali, 40% in Phuket, 30% in the Maldives.

Hainan looks weak even against other Chinese tourism provinces. Huachuang Securities data show that among the nine provinces of the Pan-Pearl River Delta, Hainan's domestic tourism revenue per resident is only slightly above Hunan's and Guangxi's, and its 2014-2015 revenue growth beat only Sichuan's.

Gao Yuxi has never been optimistic about tourism here. "Tourism can't be built up. You have some tourism, including the visa loosening and so on, but it helps very little, and it contributes very little tax," he says.

The reason is simple: when a tourism island's own facilities are underbuilt, it can attract neither foreign visitors nor Chinese visitors willing to spend.

Chi Fulin once watched a circus show at Chimelong Ocean Kingdom in Zhuhai, performed by artists from more than ten countries, which he called "world-class." Large cultural and entertainment ventures like that should be standard equipment for a tourism island, and Hainan still has no company doing it. "Honestly, I think there are far too few companies like this in Hainan," Chi Fulin, president of the China Institute for Reform and Development, wrote in his book My Hainan Dream.

Hainan has 100 tourist sites, but since the international tourism island policy, only one new top-rated (5A) attraction has been built — Qiangu Qing, a theatrical theme park. The rest of the 5A sites are essentially expansions of what already existed.

Compare Florida, the tourism state of the southern United States, which built one thing after another: the Orlando theme parks, the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, the resort paradise of Palm Beach, the international gateway airport at Miami, plus 335 theme parks of various kinds, more than 80 art galleries and museums, four symphony orchestras and four major performing arts companies — pulling in visitors from all over the world.

Hainan gives people no reason to stay longer or come back, and that problem stands in the way whether it wants foreign visitors or Chinese ones.

Over the ten years it aimed at being an international tourism island, Hainan also missed China's growing 400 million-strong middle class, who want travel and lifestyles built on experience. According to the 2017 China Outbound Tourism Big Data Report, released jointly by the China Tourism Academy and Trip.com Group, Chinese citizens made more than 130 million outbound trips in 2017, up 7% from 2016, spending US$115.29 billion. China is now the largest source of inbound tourists for ten countries.

Destinations around the world are eyeing this newly rich Chinese class hungrily. Indonesia is preparing to build ten more Balis and double its Chinese visitor numbers. Thailand, much closer to Hainan, has seen China-Thailand route capacity — flight frequency and seats — grow by an average of 36% a year since 2011.

Last year 9.8 million Chinese traveled to Thailand, more than the entire population of Hainan province, 9.17 million.

"Snobbery"

After the international tourism island policy, most of the visitors who came to Hainan were middle-aged and elderly people living on pensions. Hainan became their winter paradise.

Sanya city government data show that 400,000 to 500,000 pensioners land in Sanya every year, half of them from the Northeast — while Sanya's own population is just under 750,000.

These people, coming to Hainan from the old industrial provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning, are much like the Americans who moved from New York and Chicago to Florida in the 1950s and 1960s.

According to a survey by Professor Huang Cheng of Sanya University, a third of them earn only 2,000 to 3,000 yuan a month, and a quarter earn 1,000 to 2,000 yuan. They spend six months of the year in Sanya and go back north for the summer; fewer than 10,000 stay in Hainan all year.

From 2010, the year after the policy was introduced, the number of retirees in Sanya jumped, and local businesses opened one retirement home after another, offering medical care, indoor golf lessons and the like.

Locals made a living serving these outside retirees; the same people gradually pushed local house prices up. Sanya's summer vacancy rate is estimated at more than 80%.

Lu Yuecheng, who lives in Haikou, feels the squeeze of "surviving in the cracks." Thirty years after Hainan became a province, he still calls people from other provinces "mainlanders."

"Hainan is a small island, just over 9 million people. It faces a country of 1.3 billion, 30 big provinces — how do you compete? Just 7% of the mainland comes here and you already can't take it," Lu Yuecheng says. "Whether we welcome them or not, it's the same damn thing. Does not welcoming them solve anything? Can you stop rich people from coming?"

Lu Yuecheng drives a taxi in central Haikou and makes 3,000 to 4,000 yuan a month. Haikou's rising prices and rents leave him short of breath, and he worries less about himself than about whether his children will be able to live in this city. "Once you've pushed prices up like this, what is the next generation of Hainan people supposed to do? How do they live?"

As Sanya grew more crowded, people from other provinces spread into Hainan's other cities and counties — Wenchang, Lingshui and elsewhere.

To ease local tensions, the provincial government has in recent years begun demolishing large blocks of housing in the cities. Many believe the point is to drive out the "migratory-bird elderly," whom the government sees as thrifty and low-spending, and raise local tourism revenue.

Step by step, the preference for the rich and the distaste for the poor came into the open.

The government first raised the bar for buying property in Hainan. According to Gao Yuxi, what outsiders liked best were 50-to-60-square-meter units: small, moderate in total price.

So that is where the government started.

In November 2015, Hainan stopped approving commercial housing units under 60 square meters; Sanya pushed the floor to 80. In 2017 it rose again — the provincial housing and construction authorities said developers had built large numbers of small units and sold them off-island, so the minimum size for commercial housing went above 100 square meters.

The stated reason was dressed up: "reducing the size of the resident population, to ease pressure on infrastructure and public services."

Put plainly: at Sanya's current average of 35,000 yuan per square meter, the cheapest home you can buy there now costs 3.5 million yuan.

That threshold knocked out most outsiders who hoped to own a home in Hainan, and it cut the client list of Lu Ming, a manager at a Sanya real estate agency, to a fraction.

Lu Ming sorts his clients into a pyramid. At the base are the buyers of 50-to-60-square-meter units, the largest group. Anyone who can pull 3.5 million yuan out of personal savings to buy in Hainan is already near the top, and the higher you go, the fewer there are.

Last year Hainan happened to hit the country's "year of intensive regulation": 489 property-market measures were issued nationwide, nearly twice the 282 of 2016.

Hainan struck while the iron was hot, using property policy to screen hard for its own "high-quality" buyers.

In 2017 the province rolled out a strict "six limits" policy: limits on purchases, loans, prices, resale, unit types and development.

On April 14, 2017, Hainan imposed province-wide purchase restrictions: an outsider could own only one home in Hainan, and the down payment on a second had to be 50%.

In May, the rules required outsiders to show that a family member had paid social insurance in one of Hainan's cities or counties for two years running before they could buy in Haikou's restricted zones.

From July 1, every commercial housing unit had to be sold "fully fitted out," which meant Hainan's housing projects would be pushed toward "the high end."

In October, buyers without Hainan household registration who wanted a home in the central districts had to submit more than two years of social insurance records, and resale was barred for five years.

In November, the province stopped accepting applications to convert personal commercial mortgages into housing-fund loans.

Each layer of restriction cut out a slice of the population — the slice at the bottom of the economic chain.

The effect was immediate. Take Haikou: in 2016, residential transactions there clustered between 600,000 and 1 million yuan; from January to November 2017 the range had moved up to 1 million to 1.5 million yuan, and sales of homes above 1.5 million yuan grew by more than 300%.

Hainan got what it wanted. It had sorted out China's rich.

Florida also started out as farm country, also went through a shift toward tourism, and also drew a large wave of Americans looking for a place to convalesce. But Florida did not keep its distance from them. It turned that into one of the state's five strengths — a convalescence and resort destination, an international tourism and resort center, a hub for water sports and recreation, a national space and R&D center, and a base for tropical farming and aquaculture — and drew all kinds of people in.

Hainan, by contrast, holds itself aloof: working hard to shut out the poor, while not being attractive enough to the rich.

Huachuang Securities data show that Hainan's domestic market used to draw mainly on the high-spending Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei regions, and that its visitors now come increasingly from central and western China. Among Hainan's domestic tourists in 2015, Sichuan was the largest single source, at 9.31%.

What Hainan sells can no longer satisfy China's big spenders. It is stuck in between: it cannot reach the high end and will not serve the low one.

A Vicious Circle

The steadily tightening "favor the rich, shun the poor" policies did keep out the outsiders Hainan did not want. The high-end talent it hoped for never arrived.

Most people who work in a city want a home there. When Hainan set the minimum unit at 100 square meters and the minimum price in Sanya at 3.5 million yuan, it scared off more than outsiders. It also scared off graduates who had been thinking about working in Hainan.

The deeper problem is that Hainan's economy and industries are too small to attract people to come and work, let alone settle.

And Hainan badly needs them.

For a special economic zone, Hainan has no members of the national Academy of Sciences or Academy of Engineering, one Yangtze River Scholar, and about ten people in the national "Hundred, Thousand, Ten Thousand Talent" program.

Its permanent resident population grew by only 63,000 in 2016, and the growth rate has fallen five years in a row. Fewer than 30% of Hainan University's tourism management graduates go to work in tourism.

Hainan has become a province that loses people.

Hainan's provincial economy reached 400 billion yuan, but that ranks 27th in the country and is less than 1% of the national total. "Look at Foshan, one small city in Guangdong: its GDP is close to 800 billion yuan, and the whole of Hainan is 400 billion. A province can't match a city," says Lu Ming, who thinks Hainan's backward economy simply holds no appeal for talented people. "What draws a young person here? What industry could pull them in? Once they arrive, what chances do they get? What soil, what platform, is there for a career? There's none," he concludes.

Its own conditions are not strong enough, and the strict purchase rules scare young people off further.

This May the province announced a recruitment drive, the "Million Talents Into Hainan Action Plan (2018-2025)": anyone with a full-time associate degree or higher, a mid-level or higher professional title, or a technician-level or higher vocational qualification could obtain Hainan household registration. The goal was 200,000 people of various kinds by 2020, and a million by 2025.

But Li Shijie, a professor at Hainan University, estimates that in the week after the plan launched, only 1,000 people actually registered.

The circle of a lagging economy and a draining talent pool looks set to keep turning.

The Same Mistake Again

Through 2017, rumors that Hainan would build a free trade port kept heating up. By the end of the year, commercial housing transactions province-wide reached 260 billion yuan, up 62.2%, and volumes in nearly half of Hainan's cities and counties more than doubled.

On April 13 this year, at the ceremony marking 30 years since Hainan became a province and a special economic zone, Xi Jinping announced that the whole island would become a free trade pilot zone. House prices jumped 30%, and pre-authorized units across the province were snapped up almost instantly.

Ten years on, it all looked like the same trick played twice.

The promise of policy gave people confidence again, and as inflation kept eating the thin interest on Chinese savings, they leaned harder toward putting money into property.

Hainan became China's gold-rush destination once more. In Lu Ming's observation, most recent buyers there are buying to invest. "There's just too much yuan in China; the money needs somewhere to go. You can't buy in tier-one cities, everywhere has purchase limits, so a place like Hainan — a tier-one tourism destination with all-round appeal — is obviously the first choice," he says.

And the past ten years have taught Chinese people that investing in property is rarely a mistake. "Turn the clock back ten years and ask Chinese people what they most wanted to do. Not everyone can become Jack Ma, starting a business isn't easy — most people would have just gone and bought property, bought it blindfolded, anywhere, and probably made money," Gao Yuxi says.

So nobody wanted to miss this wave. The fact that one apartment can be worth half a lifetime's wages keeps bending how Chinese people think about investment and value.

Ten years on, the government is repeating its mistakes too. It has drawn up a third major policy for Hainan, after "special economic zone" and "international tourism island," planning the island's future through a free trade port with tax breaks and special regulation. It is too early to judge whether it will work, but Zhang Weiying, a professor at Peking University's National School of Development, has long argued that government industrial planning amounts to "marrying off couples at random." "Anything the government can see, entrepreneurs in a free market saw long ago; anything entrepreneurs haven't worked out, the government understands even less," Zhang Weiying says.

He calls industrial policy "a planned economy in disguise," a sign of nothing but government interference in economic life and in the allocation of resources.

The economist Justin Yifu Lin argues the opposite: industrial policy drives development, and the government is right 95% of the time. "Government coordination can fail, but without it things fail worse," Lin says.

Hainan fits neither Zhang Weiying's account nor Justin Yifu Lin's. In May 1988 the central government approved a "small government, big society" system for Hainan; the original idea was that "the government should keep out of anything companies and society can decide for themselves, and let the market and society do as much as possible."

Hainan was once the least regulated special economic zone in the country. Feng Lun, chairman of Vantone Holdings, once compared Hainan in the 1990s to the American gold rush in the West, with oversight extremely loose. "You arrived somewhere completely free — lawless, no limits at all," Feng Lun says.

Thirty years later, Hainan's controls keep tightening.

In 2017 the province brought in the "double suspension" and "six limits" policies to slow property growth. Because Hainan's industrial base is so narrow, every round of controls shook the whole provincial economy.

What complicates matters further is that the central government's line on Hainan has always been "develop at your own expense" — policy, but no money — and this time is no different. According to Gao Yuxi, the state has so far put no funding into the free trade port. "If they don't give you money, where does your development money come from? Upgrading the whole industrial base at once, attracting new industries — that doesn't happen fast either," he says.

Florida is the usual comparison for Hainan. The Disney park built in the 1960s was the turning point for Florida's tourism, but Hainan has no company like Disney with nearly a century of accumulated capital, and it is not strong enough to bring big companies in. The government can certainly provide the support needed at the start, but supporting is not the same as controlling everything, and controlling everything is neither the government's job nor within its power.

Today's over-control looks less like support than like a running correction of past mistakes.

The biggest correction came on April 22 this year. To reduce its dependence on property, Hainan announced purchase restrictions across the whole island: buyers without Hainan household registration who wanted to buy in the newly restricted zones would have to show 24 months or more of cumulative income tax or social insurance payments in Hainan, and in zones already restricted — Sanya, Haikou, Qionghai, Wuzhishan and others, seven in all — 60 months.

In an earlier story on Hainan's property agents, we noted that with social insurance systems now linked nationwide, a person can only pay into one place at a time: paying in Hainan means giving up your local coverage. You can pay income tax in two places at once, but nobody can guarantee whether the policy will be scrapped within five years, or whether prices will spike or crash.

Both options cost too much and carry too much risk for outsiders, and the April 22 rules all but closed the road to buying a home in Hainan.

Unlike earlier rounds, this time Hainan did not just exclude outsiders. It also indirectly expelled local developers, local agents and local residents.

Eighty percent of Hainan property agents' clients came from off the island. Once the government closed off outsiders' purchases, the agents lost their biggest source of business. After April 22, the jobs of tens of thousands of agents in Hainan were destroyed overnight by policy.

As one of Hainan's local developers, Gao Yuxi's company began carrying out an escape plan of its own.

His property company was forced to speed up its overseas expansion. "Because there's basically no chance of getting land to develop in Hainan anymore. The government isn't selling land," he says.

Since last year, his company's land applications have been rejected repeatedly. Developers can no longer build only housing: alongside the homes they must now build hotels, racetracks and other facilities in line with the international tourism island or the free trade port.

That has raised the bar for property development directly. Gao Yuxi thinks the government will tilt future opportunities toward big companies — only firms with the central state-owned "Zhong" prefix in their names will be able to acquire land in Hainan — and that the industry will concentrate further. "Land is limited, so your slice of the pie" — the local developers' slice — "is gone," he says. "The era of making money in Hainan purely by selling homes, exactly as before: personally, I don't think it will ever come back."

Local people have been left out of one round of policy planning after another.

"What the hell kind of international tourism island? What free trade port?" Lu Yuecheng complains while driving. As he sees it, every new label given to Hainan makes the city's homes more expensive and his own life worse. "I have two kids in college — where would I get that kind of money?… I can't even afford a secondhand apartment," he says.

At the end of 2016, two subsidiaries of HNA Group bought the shantytown redevelopment project around Hongcheng Lake in central Haikou for 815 million yuan. The project covers nearly 7,000 households, more than 24,000 people, and over a million square meters of housing.

Lu Yuecheng is one of those 7,000-odd households.

Within five years he will have to rent somewhere else. He describes his situation this way: "You could say I have a home, or you could say I don't."

Developing a tourism island is a kind of colonialism: once the outsiders have been driven off, the local poor still have to pay for what was done.

In the early days of the international tourism island, Hainan set aside land for 100,900 units of affordable housing and opened a fast-track approval channel for them.

By February 2016, after years of overbuilding had left large numbers of homes empty, the government decided that to work through the inventory it would stop building new public rental housing and hand out cash subsidies instead, encouraging locals to rent rather than buy.

Hainan's own people ended up with no fixed home at all.

Li Baiqing, a Liaoning native who served as deputy mayor of Sanya from 2012 to 2016, once said: "If the new migrants left this city, Sanya would become a ghost town overnight."

After April 22, Hainan's agents scattered to cities across the country, the Northeastern retirees went home, and the new talent never rushed in as hoped. Around Jiefang Road in central Sanya, look up and you see countless buildings dozens of stories high, and nothing else but the glare of the summer sun.

Sanya has become an empty city.

After all the noise, this isolated island still does not seem to have woken from the dream.

In early June, whenever we said the word "housing" in a Sanya taxi, every driver we met immediately handed over his own card or an agent's. For a long stretch of time, a driver who delivered a passenger to a sales office earned a 200-yuan bonus.

They forgot the lesson quickly.

Even though every one of them is tangled in his own worries. The government is unhappy and officials have no direction; the people in charge are angling for a casino license, imagining a sudden leap to greatness, the world's all-in gamblers arriving on schedule and Hainan becoming the next Las Vegas; the seasonally migrating elderly from the Northeast go on absorbing local scorn and blame; locals complain that outsiders make all the money and leave them nowhere to turn; developers lose their chances amid the constant shifts in policy; agents wait for the storm to pass and hope they can still collect their promised commissions, wondering where China's next "Hainan" will be.

Nobody is satisfied with life as it is. Everyone feels things were wrong before, and may be more wrong now.

Cover image: Unsplash, szsde, Xinhuanet, yzwb, photographed by Wen Xinyu.

Note: At the interviewees' request, Lu Yuecheng, Gao Yuxi and Lu Ming are pseudonyms.