U.S. immigration agents detained 68‑year‑old Chinese businesswoman Cui Lijie on Jan. 13 in Saipan, the main island of the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). The arrest, carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), was announced by local media and has reverberated across Chinese‑language and regional financial circles because Cui is widely identified as the figure behind the casino complex once billed as Saipan’s answer to Macau.
Cui’s name has long been linked to a rapid, offshore gambling expansion that stretched from northeastern China and Macau to Hong Kong and into the Western Pacific. Her family’s firm built and operated the “Bohua Palace Saipan” project after acquiring the island’s only casino licence in 2014; at its peak the operator reported enormous VIP turnover and tens of billions of Hong Kong dollars in quarterly betting volume, figures that made the venture seem wildly out of scale for an island of fewer than 200 square kilometres.
The arrest matters less for the narrow immigration charge cited so far than for the way it reconnects a constellation of issues: opaque high‑stakes gambling flows, complex corporate structures crossing multiple jurisdictions, and the regulatory and criminal scrutiny those arrangements attract. Cui is also the mother of Ji Xiaobo, the businessman whose long relationship with Taiwanese celebrity Wu Peici drew tabloid attention and whose own rise and sudden disappearance from the public eye mirrored the family’s financial fortunes.
Cui’s family rose from modest beginnings in Heilongjiang province to build a business framed around VIP gaming intermediation in Macau and, later, the Pacific casino project. Their firm quickly scaled VIP rooms across major Macau operators and later pivoted fully into casino ownership in Saipan after buying a publicly listed shell and using it to acquire the Bohua gambling assets. Between 2014 and 2017 the group reported extraordinary revenues heavily concentrated in high‑roller play, only for the operation to collapse after licence suspensions, pandemic shutdowns and a string of financial and governance problems.
Regulatory trouble was compounded by domestic and international developments. A close associate — Cui’s sister — has been convicted in China as part of a criminal network dismantled for organised crime, and the family’s listed vehicle was delisted in Hong Kong after audit issues and mounting losses. The Saipan project entered bankruptcy proceedings and was eventually sold at a fraction of earlier valuations, although reporting by The Washington Post and others suggests residual ties between the new owner and the family.
Saipan’s status as a U.S. territory that allows visa‑free short stays for mainland Chinese tourists has been central to the business model: easy access and a physical U.S. jurisdiction helped attract mainland VIPs who lacked U.S. visas. U.S. authorities now face the awkward reality that immigration and customs tools are being used to police financial and vice‑related networks that operate across U.S. territorial waters, American law and foreign capital flows.
ICE has not published public details of Cui’s case or any follow‑on criminal charges, and it remains unclear whether she held an E‑2C investor visa — a special CNMI category used by long‑term investors in the islands. Nevertheless, the detention signals heightened willingness by U.S. agencies to use immigration enforcement as an entry point into broader investigations of cross‑border gambling, money movement and regulatory breaches.
For Beijing and regional regulators the episode exposes the limits of regulatory arbitrage. An operation built to exploit loopholes — rapid VIP turnover, multi‑jurisdictional corporate shells and the mobility of high‑net‑worth gamblers — can still be felled by a combination of market shocks, domestic prosecutions in China, and foreign enforcement. The practical impact will be felt in how future Chinese capital seeks to develop leisure and gaming projects abroad, and in how U.S. territories calibrate oversight of foreign investors and high‑risk financial flows.