China Cracksdown On Online Gambling
11th February, 2010
China is to crack down on the online gambling industry with severe punishments for website operators who run underground banks and third party payment platforms.
A report from Reuters has said that China’s Ministry of public security’s campaign will run until August and will ‘concentrate on investigating major and important cases of online gambling, knock out domestic and foreign groups that organise online gambling and severely punish the criminal elements’.
The concentrated effort has been agreed by eight government bodies that include the Supreme Court, Propaganda Bureau, the Central Bank and the Ministry Of Industry And Information Technology.
Gambling was banned in mainland china in 1949, after the communist takeover with the only exceptions being two state lotteries. One of the state lotteries is run by the Ministry of sport to fund building facilities.
Despite the ban, underground casinos, overseas conglomerates and illegal syndicates have sprung up across the nation. This campaign is a similar drive that was designed to eradicate pornography in the country. Lots of sites have been caught in the long-running anti-pornography operation including those featuring politically sensitive and user-generated content, many critics have viewed it as a bid by the Chinese government to reassert control over new media.
By Faye
