In this paper, I consider the role of precarity in the lives of Chinese migrants and tourists in Cambodian Special Economic Zones following Covid-19. The gambling industry in Cambodia exploded in 2017, when Chinese-funded casinos took once-sleepy beach town of Sihanoukville, bringing both workers and tourists from China seeking to gamble abroad, something that is illegal in China. In three short years leading up to the pandemic, Sihanoukville was transformed by the influx of casinos and accompanying Chinese hotels, restaurants, and karaoke clubs, and Chinese nationals came to own 90 percent of businesses in the city. But in August 2019, the Cambodian government announced a ban on online gambling, attributed to crime associated with online gambling. In just four months the market fizzled, with half of the casinos in Sihanoukville closing and some 450,000 Chinese nationals leaving the country. Then Covid hit, decimating foreign tourism – the source of essentially all casino customers. The paper considers the vast change which has befallen Sihanoukville over these six years, and how mobility of Chinese tourists and migrants reflects different modes of coping with the precarity that arises in contexts of rapid infrastructure development, and how their particular experiences of mobility contest normative understandings of tourism and mobility.
