The central government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is purposefully constructing a unique metropolis in the Pearl River Delta Region. They have branded this metropolis the Greater Bay Area (GBA). The GBA is a key component of China’s urbanization program and post-Mao consumer economy. Today the PRC is rapidly urbanizing hundreds of millions of rural peasants in hope of creating an urban consumer economy that will wean the country from the production-for-export manufacturing regime with which Deng Xiaoping jump-started economic reforms in 1978. This contemporary urbanization program is remarkable for its overt distinction from urban policies under Maoist rule. In the socialist era, Chinese leaders tried to eliminate the characteristic of “urbanism” from China’s cities in an effort to adapt them as sites of production for the socialist economy. However, today Chinese leaders hope that what Wirth called “urbanism as a way of life” will stimulate consumption. To fulfill this ambition, the central government is constructing a unique megacity with “Chinese characteristics” – a post-colonial, post-Fordist, and post-socialist GBA metropolis. Tourism is a key factor in development of this metropolitan environment. This paper traces the mutually constitutive relationship between tourist mobility and the GBA metropolis. The Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) is a linchpin in this process. The former Portuguese colony of Macau serves as both an inspiration for the “exacerbated difference” which is characteristic of this new GBA metropolitan environment, and as a laboratory for production of urban consumers on which this new metropolis depends. Key to my analysis is the conception of tourism as a form of labor, not merely leisure, and one component of a biopolitical effort to enhance citizen “quality” (suzhi) for the benefit of the post-socialist macro-economic planning of the state. Therefore, China’s political economy is supported by a concomitant subjective economy in which tourism plays a crucial role. Macau is an important site for production of this subjective economy.