A leading expert in gambling studies has called on the Chinese
government to legalize betting products to cash in on some of the
700 billion yuan (US$87.4 billion) that are being lost through
illegal gambling each year.
"Illegal gambling in China has continued to grow in recent
years. According to our market investigations, the revenue
generated from the legal lottery in China is 10 times less than
illegal gambling revenue. In 2005, the total revenue of China's
legal lottery reached 70 billion yuan (US$8.74 billion), while the
illegal betting revenue was around 700 billion yuan," said Wang
Xuehong, head of the China Center for Lottery Studies at Peking
University.
"The development of the lottery in China is in line with its
social development," Wang said. "If the government could legalize
more lottery products, the illegal market would definitely
shrink."
The market exists and gambling is part of human nature. If the
choice of legalized products is too limited, the majority will be
forced underground, she added.
She cited that in developed countries, gambling revenues usually
account for 2 to 3 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP),
while in China, authorized gambling income accounts for less than 1
percent of GDP.
Illegal gambling in China mainly involves Internet betting,
playing at underground casinos and buying and selling private
lotteries, according to Wang.
The center previously reported that each year, 600 billion yuan
(US$75 billion) in bets is placed overseas, 15 times more than the
amount spent each year on China's state-run lottery and equal to
the annual revenue of the country's tourism industry.
But the government is showing no immediate signs of relaxing the
country's gambling laws. Expressing a different point of view, Luo
Yifeng, a deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC) said that the most severe penalty for
gambling is a three-year prison sentence, which is too light to act
as a deterrent. He suggested that the NPC devise special laws to
prohibit gambling altogether.
According to the Ministry of Public Security, China loses
hundreds of billions of yuan each year to gambling in many
forms.
International gambling companies earned a total of 10 billion
euros in bets during this year's soccer World Cup, of which 60
percent was placed by punters from the Chinese mainland and
Southeast Asia, according to a recent report in the Beijing
Morning Post.
Gambling was outlawed on the Chinese mainland in 1949 when the
People's Republic of China was founded.
(Xinhua News Agency July 19, 2006)