National People's Congress (NPC) deputy Luo Yifeng has presented a motion to the country's top legislature that calls for a stand-alone bill to prohibit gambling.

The proposal calls for government and company chiefs to be made special targets and heavier penalties be imposed in any future crackdown.

"A new, special law banning gambling, with heavier penalties meted out to violators, is a lasting solution to prevent gambling," Luo claimed yesterday.

But China's gambling-busters and legal experts, while agreeing on harder strikes, said they preferred amending or changing judicial interpretations of existing statutes to creating new legislation.

The current Criminal Law, enacted in 1979 and amended since, sets a maximum punishment of three years in prison for gambling. The penalties are seen by some as too lenient, "especially considering that many cases involve millions of yuan and often corrupt social morals," said Luo.

The proposed law would explicitly prohibit any government officials and executives of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) from gambling.

"It will also set up parameters to differentiate normal entertainment activities from gambling activities," Luo explained.

Casinos and other forms of gambling have caused a chain of social problems, and participation of officials and SOE executives has increased corruption and led to a loss of state assets, Luo said. This makes it imperative to increase the deterrent effect of the law.

Debates on an anti-gambling strategy have drawn widespread attention during the week-long NPC session.

The Ministry of Public Security said in a statement issued on Monday that China's existing criminal code was weak in terms of controlling gambling, but that revision of the law would be an effective and more efficient way to deal with the problem.

The Criminal Law could be amended to allow for more severe penalties for serious offenders, and expanded to include new forms of gambling, such on the Internet and or outside the mainland.

Guo Bing, a division director of the Yunnan Province Department of Public Affairs, concurred with the need to impose stiffer sentences to deter violators.

An anti-gambling mission launched by the provincial police has forced 78 casinos in the neighboring countries out of business since late December, according to Guo. "Compared with making a special law to prohibit gambling, I think it is more viable to improve the current statute," he said.

Chu Huaizhi, a senior law expert at Peking University, said that in a workshop held last week the Supreme People's Court and Supreme People's Procuratorate had indicated that new judicial interpretations of the gambling article in the Criminal Law were planned. The interpretations, soon to be released, would clarify the definition of "gambling activities."

Chu added that it would be impossible to eliminate gambling completely, comparing such a prohibition to the ban on prostitution. "It helped curb the vice, but the phenomenon still exists in some places," he said, suggesting that high technology and more efficient border inspections be used to check illegal gambling at its source.

(China Daily March 8, 2005)