Chinese Online Gambling Crackdown on the Cards

One foot in the past and one foot in the future is how many people describe China, a country that has grown in leaps and bounds since its communist shackles were loosened, and which is increasingly embracing western ideals on one hand, but is still clinging to its totalitarian past on the other.

This contradiction can most clearly be seen in China's attitude towards the internet, and closely related online gambling. A few years ago the Chinese government took the forward-thinking step of allowed the world's biggest internet search engine, Google, to launch a Chinese version, but with a big catch.

The government would be able to censor the search results. And while this made world headlines and went against everything Google, a multi-billion dollar template of American capitalism, stand for, the mammoth internet search engine relented. But not without being criticized in many quarters.

Two areas the Chinese government wanted to 'protect' its citizens from in particular were pornography and online gambling. The first one is probably no surprise given the prevalence of porn on the internet, but the second one was a little surprising considering China's long and rich gambling heritage.

Even though gambling was banned in China in 1949 when the Communists took over, Chinese gamblers continued to gamble through two state-owned lotteries. However, as China began to thaw from its 'Communist freeze', underground land and online gambling operations sprang up like wildfire.

But instead of embracing the return to its millennia old gambling roots, the Chinese government has continued to crack down on online gambling even more. Just this month the Chinese Ministry of Public Security announced that it will launch a nationwide anti-online gambling campaign to run until August.

A Ministry of Public Security read: 'The campaign will concentrate on investigating major and important cases of online gambling, knock out domestic and foreign groups that organize online gambling, and severely punish the criminal elements.' Which is Chinese terms could well mean the death penalty.

In March last year, the Chinese government banned YouTube after Chinese citizens had access to a video of a Tibetan protestor, who was injured and ultimately died at the hands of Chinese authorities. The government has also blocked access to other social networks Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.