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Jeju is a beautiful island where some of the most interesting things in South Korea’s casino business are blossoming. With UNESCO World Natural Heritage sites, dozens of golf courses and one of the world’s busiest air routes linking it to Seoul, Jeju is also home to half of South Korea’s 16 foreigner-only casinos, but those eight establishments have barely scratched the surface of the island’s gaming potential. A conference this week will help clarify whether Jeju’s extraordinary possibilities, including one US$1 billion-plus integrated resort already open and another on track to launch next October, will be realized cooperatively or, instead, casinos will be part of a three – or more – sided tug of war between casino competitors and government where no one wins.

Jeju developed separately from the rest of the country geologically and culturally. A volcanic island 64 kilometers (40 miles) off the Korean peninsula’s southern coast, Jeju flows around Hallasan, Korea’s tallest mountain at 1,950 meters (6,400 feet), believed to have last erupted 5,000 years ago. Volcanic activity left a legacy of dramatic landscapes, and, with separation from the peninsula, unique biospheres. The elliptical island roughly three times the size of Singapore with a population similar to Macau at 650,000, has a distinct dialect and narrative, embodied in its female seafood divers and ubiquitous basalt stone grandfather carvings. Jeju’s climate is milder than the peninsula, creating a verdant haven for hiking and biking, a green getaway for urban dwellers that attracted 15 million visitors last year.

In 2006, the island became Jeju Special Self-Governing Province. That enabled Jeju to allow visa-free entry for mainland Chinese and inhabitants of all but a dozen jurisdictions around the world. That’s been beneficial to casinos, part of Jeju’s landscape for decades. They rely on foreign tourists since Jeju’s autonomy doesn’t extend to overturning the national government’s prohibition on Koreans playing in its casinos.

Political tensions with Beijing over deployment of the THAAD missile defense system have cut visitor arrivals from mainland China since early 2017, but, in the long run, geography works in Jeju’s favor. Shanghai is just 55 minutes away by air, and Beijing, as well as Tokyo, within two and a half hours.

All of that convinced Chinese developer Landing International to create Jeju Shinhwa World, a US$1.5 billion integrated resort complex. Shinhwa World opened its casino on February 25 and, according to its interim report, had raked in more casino revenue by June 30 than the 2017 full year total for all eight of Jeju’s casinos. With a theme park based on Korean animation Larva, K-Pop themed entertainment and restaurants, water park and unique convention and meeting options in a suburban setting, Shinhwa World draws comparisons with Singapore’s Resorts World Sentosa, unsurprising perhaps since Genting Group that controls RW Sentosa was originally a partner in the project.

South Korea’s Lotte Tours is developing a Jeju counterpart to Singapore’s modern landmark Marina Bay Sands. Jeju Dream Tower will be the island’s tallest building with 38 story twin towers, given permission to rise three times the usual height limit meant to preserve views of Mount Halla. The integrated resort will feature Asia’s largest Grand Hyatt with 1,600 suites measuring at least 65 square meters (700 square feet) and South Korea’s biggest outdoor pool deck, smack in the middle of Jeju City, minutes from the airport that’s due to double its capacity by 2025.

Jeju’s political leaders and population view casino expansion with decided ambivalence, not unlike other host community across the world. They welcome the jobs and other economic benefits, they worry about potential damage to the island environment and social fabric.

This week’s Jeju International Casino Policy Forum, organized by the Jeju government’s Casino Regulatory Commission, Jeju Tourism Organization and the Integrated Resort Gaming Research Center of Kyunghee University in Seoul, brings together some 300 casino industry stakeholders, regulators and observers to tackle the theme “Mutual Growth of Jeju’s Casino Industry and Local Community.”

It’s an opportunity to examine what Jeju wants from casinos and what policies can best achieve that. Some policies that sound right, such as Macau’s requirement to employ local residents as dealers, may prove impediments to long term development of the labor pool as well as short term headaches for operators.

Across Asia, Singapore is one of the few places that approached casinos with a clear idea of what it wanted to achieve and plans to mitigate the social cost. Although Jeju aspires to become an international city like Singapore, the Lion City’s casino model doesn’t necessarily travel. It’s to the Jeju authorities’ credit that they are anxious to open the casino discussion to a broader audience. It’s something that Japan might learn from as it creates its own casino industry with some of the largest integrated resorts ever built, likely to cast similarly long shadows.