At the height of the Chinese gambling craze, every day more than 100 Chinese travelled across the Tumen River to the neighbouring Rajin-Sonbong Free Trade Zone in North Korea to gamble in the Hong Kong-built Emperor Hotel and Casino. Chinese tourists, including some Party and government officials, were gambling hundreds of millions of yuan each year. A local Korean official was quoted as saying "All who go to the Emperor are completely Chinese."

Gambling, along with prostitution and drugs, are illegal in China. While still officially illegal, betting at horsetracks has re-emerged and the Chinese regularly place their bets on soccer teams. Casinos are the lifeblood of tiny Macao, which returned from Portuguese to Chinese rule in 1999, and was reported to have made US$1.8 billion from gambling in 2004.

Several Chinese officials gambling away public money have received harsh punishments that range from prison to death sentences. Two years ago the Shenyang mayor was handed a suspended death sentence and a vice-mayor was executed for gambling away millions of dollars of public funds in Macao. Gambling in North Korea has become a hot topic in China since Cai Haowen, former head of traffic and transport management in China’s northeastern Jilin Province, was found to have fled after squandering some US$423,000 (3.5 million yuan) in public funds and borrowed money on gambling junkets to Emperor casino.

About 50,000 Chinese, with about 30% of them government officials, visit the Emperor every year, with average spend per player of around US$600. The Party's corruption watchdog in the Yanbian region has asked local officials to learn from Cai's case. A public notice warned officials along these lines: "In the future, when government officials are found gambling they will be sacked. If they are found gambling abroad they will be expelled from the Party." LEGAL ENFORCEMENT
Yesterday at the National People's Congress (NPC), the country's top legislature, legislator Luo Yifeng submitted proposals for a stand-alone bill to prohibit gambling activities, calling for government and company chiefs to be made special targets and heavier penalties be introduced in any future crackdown, claiming that a new, special law banning gambling, with heavier penalties meted out to violators, would be a lasting solution to prohibit gambling.

However, Chinese lawmakers and enforcers are divided over the proposed law to ban gambling, and a division has ensued following Luo’s bill. While agreeing on harder penalties, China's gambling-busters and legal experts said they preferred amending or changing judicial interpretations of current statutes to creating new anti-gambling legislation.

China’s current Criminal Law, enacted in 1979 and amended since, sets a maximum punishment for gambling of three years in jail. Luo claimed that the penalties are seen by some as too lenient when considering that many cases usually involve millions of yuan and often corrupt social morals, adding: "My proposed law will explicitly ban any government officials and State firm executives from gambling. It will also set up parameters to differentiate normal entertainment activities from gambling activities."

The anti-gambling campaign office under the Ministry of Public Security issued a press release on Monday saying that the relevant clause of China's criminal code was ineffectual when applied to curb the situation in China. "But considering China's current conditions, time is not ripe yet for making a special anti-gambling law. It is better to revise the existing Criminal Law to fix the problem in a more timely fashion."

The statement singled out two points many law-enforcers believe will facilitate the crackdown on gambling. The first is about the measurement of penalty. The Criminal Law, if revised, could hand out more severe punishments to serious offenders instead of a three-year term and fines, it said.

The second is to have the Criminal Law include new forms of gambling, such as gambling on the Internet and/or gambling outside the Chinese mainland. Guo Bing, a division director of the Department of Public Affairs in Yunnan Province in Southwest China, said it is important to revise the current law as soon as possible to "increase the cost to those attempting to commit a gambling crime." (E-03.08.05)

© Copyright 2005 CasinoCompendium



>>> return to archives
>>> return to frontpage