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)