North Korea to open casino
Asian gamblers looking for thrills will soon have a new - and unlikely - place to make a few bets: communist North Korea.
With no direct flights from anywhere in the outside world, it's not easy to get to the $180 million Seaview Casino Hotel in North Korea's Rajin economic free zone, which opens Saturday.
Still, the Hong Kong investor, Emperor Group, is betting that northern Chinese - banned from most forms of gambling at home - will flock to the four-star hotel, which offers everything from blackjack and roulette to slot machines.
Visa-restrictions limit visitors to Chinese, but Emperor hopes to start catering soon to Russians and other foreigners who can get visas. North Koreans are not allowed to patronize the casino, although they will comprise 70 percent of its staff, with the rest Chinese.
To get there, visitors must fly to Beijing, transfer to Yanji in China's Jilin province and take a four-hour drive across the border to Rajin in northeastern North Korea.
''People are quite amazed and fascinated by North Korea,'' said Kenny Wong, an executive at Emperor, noting that 15 Chinese guests are booked for Saturday's opening.
Still, he acknowledged that attracting people to the secretive, impoverished country with the lure of getting lucky and striking it rich is a hard sell. ''We're targeting rich Chinese, but there aren't plenty around now,'' Wong said.
There won't be much else to do in Rajin besides betting, although the hotel offers three restaurants, karaoke, sauna rooms and a swimming pool.
Underscoring the incongruity of introducing a symbol of capitalist excess to a communist country, North Korean officials originally opposed the word casino in the hotel's name. Eventually they backed down.
After decades of communist mismanagement, North Korea is trying to rebuild its economy and woo foreign investors with tax cuts and other incentives to the Rajin-Sonbong area, a free-trade zone set up in the early 1990s.
North Korea is in the fourth year of severe food shortages exacerbated by a series of natural disasters.
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