The number of foreign casinos near China's borders dropped from 149 in 2005 to 28 last year as the country made it hard for people to slip abroad to gamble as part of its anti-gambling campaign.

The police have taken a range of measures including heavier punishments, closing agencies of foreign casinos in China and busting underground "banks" that helped transfer money for overseas gambling, according to the Ministry of Public Security yesterday.

The ministry worked with local police in border areas in Yunnan, Guangxi, Heilongjiang and Jilin to carry out surveillance of the operation, guests and gambling activities of nearby casinos, said an official with the ministry.

He gave an example of a major case cracked in China's southern boomtown Shenzhen. Local police closed five online agencies and 110 gambling websites operated by foreign casinos, which forced two overseas casinos to shut down.

According to the ministry, some casinos in neighboring countries were opened especially to entertain Chinese gamblers.

China's police busted a total of 347,000 gambling cases involving 1.099 million people last year and retrieved 3.56 billion yuan (US$456.6 million) of betting money, according to official statistics.

Earlier reports estimated that a total of 600 billion yuan (US$76.9 billion) had been wagered overseas by last July. This is 15 times more than is spent each year on China's state-run lottery and equal to the annual revenue of the country's tourism industry.

(Xinhua News Agency January 12, 2007)