The backwash from Sihanoukville could be felt most of the way up National Road 4, the dilapidated two-lane highway linking Cambodia’s capital to its southern coast. When I made the trip down in late 2018, the traffic frequently slowed to a crawl behind a seemingly endless line of trucks hauling construction materials — sand, gravel, cement. The snarls foreshadowed the frenzy of construction that had recently transformed the shabby port city on the Gulf of Thailand from a tourist backwater into a sordid gambling mecca.
The Chinese investments in Sihanoukville were a side effect of the increasing political intimacy between the Cambodian government and China, which has become its most important international backer, its main trading partner and its primary source of tourism and foreign investment. I hadn’t visited Sihanoukville in seven years, but I was astonished by the changes. Like a tropical storm surge, a wave of Chinese capital had overwhelmed the city’s infrastructure and sparse planning regulations. High-rise hotels and apartment buildings pressed up into the evening sky. City streets crumbled under the weight of cranes and cement trucks, and rainwater pooled in the ruts.
The focus of the development was the dozens of Chinese-run casinos, bantam venues with names like New MGM and New Macao, glowing like illuminated amber in the evening murk. The scene inside reminded me of the casino settlements I had visited in far-flung parts of Myanmar and Laos, which had sprung up in loosely regulated jurisdictions to tap the dammed-up Chinese demand for gambling, a practice banned in mainland China outside Macao. The baccarat tables were ringed by gamblers — mostly jumpy young Chinese men in T-shirts — who smoked and glowered over the baize.
Out on O’Chheuteal Beach, in the soft focus of early evening, tourists lounged beneath Angkor Beer umbrellas and churned the surf on jet skis. Farther down the beach, Cambodian beachgoers — most of them off-duty casino dealers and construction workers — leapt in the waves. Here the bucket bars and restaurants that had once served the budget Western backpacker market had now passed to Chinese management, serving an overwhelmingly Chinese clientele. The scene was an apt symbol of Cambodia’s shifting international alignments.
