QUITE A FEW Macau residents seem wary about their SAR's prospects in the new lunar year, which starts on Wednesday.
The Year of the Snake has traditionally been associated with helter-skelter changes and chaos created by serpentine characters.
However, Chinese astrology's dialectical approach to the future usually has, quite conveniently, the right solution at hand if any developments should threaten to go wrong.
This will be Macau's second lunar-year cycle since its reversion from Portuguese to local-Chinese rule, and it promises major political, social and economic changes.
Autumn will see the first legislative polls since the 1999 handover. Election campaigns are expected to be dominated by bread-and-butter issues: the perceived interconnection of unemployment among local workers and the import of cheap labour, scarce job opportunities for school leavers and university graduates, and increasing demands that Macau's pampered public servants finally start paying taxes.
Populists and demagogues are quite probably going to have a field day, considering the local electorate's relatively low education level.
The Government is known to be keen to finalise its reform of the gaming industry before incumbents and newcomers start battling it out on the hustings. Official sources say details of the new gaming regime - namely, the breakup of the existing monopoly franchise on casinos and pertinent gambling-control measures - will probably be announced this summer.