Xi Jinping urges Macau to diversify economy away from casinos

Chinese president calls for city to focus on cultivating new industries' as he attends inauguration of new leader

China's president, Xi Jinping, has urged the gambling hub of Macau to diversify away from casinos, as he addressed the Chinese territory at the inauguration of its new leader.

Xi was in Macau to mark the 25th anniversary of its return from Portuguese to Chinese rule on 20 December 1999. In the quarter-century since then, Macau has been run as a special administrative region of China, a semi-autonomous territory with a similar legal status to Hong Kong, but it has traditionally been much more pliant to Beijing's rule than the former British territory. More than half of its 700,000 population immigrated from China in recent decades.