China losing $ 87 bn to illegal gambling

BEIJING, July 19: A Chinese official has called for legalising gambling to cash in on some of the 700 billion yuan (87.5 billion dollar) lost through illegal channels each year, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

''The market is there and gambling is part of human nature,'' Xinhua quoted Wang Xuehong, head of the China Centre for Lottery Studies at Peking University, as saying in an overnight report.

''If the choice of legalised products is too limited the majority will be forced underground,'' she said.

China banned gambling after the Communists swept to power in 1949. State-sanctioned lotteries operate, but legal gambling revenues are dwarfed by black market takings, Xinhua said.

China's lotteries reaped 70 billion yuan (8.75 billion dollar) in 2005, while 600 billion yuan (75 billion dollar) was bet overseas -- equal to the annual revenue of the country's tourism industry, Xinhua said.

This year's soccer World Cup finals highlighted China's gambling fervour, with near daily reports of police cracking multi-million dollar gambling rings.

Earlier in the month, the police in the southwestern province of Sichuan brought down a billion yuan online betting syndicate involving thousands of registered users across the country, the Beijing News reported.

Rife illegal gambling has prompted calls for harsher penalties from government officials, Xinhua said, but others see legalised gambling as inevitable.

''The development of the lottery in China is in line with its social development,'' Xinhua quoted Wang as saying.

REUTERS