Trend Runs Afoul of ‘Socialist Ethics’ : Lotteries a Bad Gamble, Peking Decides

Last December, officials in the Huangpu district of Shanghai hit on a way to step up their anti-rat campaign. They decided to have a lottery.

Any person working in the district could get a ticket in the lottery, the officials announced, simply by handing in a rat, dead or alive. The officials said there were 20,000 tickets, and that the two luckiest rat-catchers would be given electric blankets.

The rat lottery was just one more effort to get on the China-wide lottery bandwagon. Beginning last fall, with the apparent approval of the authorities in Peking, lotteries cropped up throughout China. They quickly became one of the most common methods of promoting sales and raising funds.

But by March the phenomenon had come to an abrupt halt. In a sudden and ominous change of direction, the authorities in Peking have banned public lotteries, saying they had become part of a “new and unhealthy trend.”

On March 2, China’s three leading newspapers all carried articles denouncing lotteries as being “counter to our efforts to build socialist ethics.” The People’s Daily, the organ of the Chinese Communist Party, declared that the lotteries were reminiscent of “the days of pre-liberation Shanghai.”

Within 24 hours, China’s government-owned television station broadcast an abject self-criticism for a lottery it had put on the previous week, on the eve of the Chinese New Year. On the nationwide evening news program, before an audience of tens of millions, an announcer apologized, calling the lottery disgusting and cheap fanfare.

For ordinary Chinese, it was a chilling reminder of how quickly the political winds can change. In less than six months, the lotteries arose, were reported in the press, swept across the country, were criticized, and were banned.

The turnabout was the most dramatic indication of a noticeable change in mood in China over the last few weeks. Last fall, when the regime unveiled a far-reaching package of economic reforms, the country was poised for what its leaders called historic change. The leaders extolled the virtues of a flexible price and wage system. Newspapers held out the prospect of a consumer society in which all would be encouraged to make and spend more money and, in the process, stimulate production and national wealth.

Some Second Thoughts

“Socialism does not mean pauperism,” the Central Committee of the Communist Party said last October. The Guangming Daily, the newspaper for intellectuals, urged consumers to get rid of “the obsolete idea that a colorful life style is taboo.”

Now, there have been some second thoughts. Because of fears of inflation, the government has been moving to clamp down on what it calls unauthorized pay raises and bonuses to workers. Because of worries about shortages of goods, it has been warning the people not to expect too much too quickly in the way of material advancement.

“The desire to have more wages and bonuses by some people may sound very good, but cannot be met easily,” the People’s Daily said in a front-page commentary. “This is because our national economy is still backward on the whole. The living standard of our people cannot be expected to improve faster than production.”

The term “unhealthy tendencies” has cropped up more and more in Chinese newspapers and broadcasts. It has been applied not just to lotteries, but to economic crimes, circulation-hungry newspapers, black-market currency transactions and, in some instances, to the simple desire for more money.

Love of Money Decried

Hu Qiaomu, a member of the Communist Party Politburo and one of the principal architects of last year’s “spiritual pollution” campaign against Western influence, recently told a group of army and party leaders, “We should overcome the unhealthy tendency among some people of putting money above all else.”

On Friday, a special “consolidation guidance commission” of the party announced that it will focus its efforts in the upcoming months on correcting “unhealthy tendencies” that have been detected among local party members in the early stages of the economic reform program.

According to Bo Yibo, the vice chairman of the guidance commission, these “unhealthy tendencies” include “party and government officials engaging in business, speculation in scarce goods, illegally buying and selling foreign currencies, setting arbitrary prices, randomly distributing bonuses and making undeserved promotions.”

The lotteries, in particular, aroused the ire of conservative party officials because they smacked of outright gambling--an old Chinese passion that for years was denounced by Mao Tse-tung and was officially banned after the Communist takeover in 1949.

Consumerism Exposed

The People’s Daily said the lotteries were a throwback to the era when the Chinese wagered their nest eggs on horse races and even dog races in Shanghai. “It (a lottery) tempts (people) into trusting to luck and gambling,” the paper complained.

Furthermore, the lotteries exposed the hunger of ordinary Chinese for more consumer goods in a highly visible and uncontrolled fashion. People vied with one another to buy raffle tickets just on the slim chance that they might win a TV set.

To the participants, it was just a matter of fun. “I hope I win,” a young Chinese teacher of English said last month as she casually bought a raffle ticket at a New Year’s festival fair in downtown Peking.

But even the reformers trying to open up the Chinese economy had trouble justifying the lotteries. Fun and chance did not figure into the economists’ equations.

Speaking of the lotteries that were being used as sales promotions, the Economic Daily, a leading advocate of economic reforms, said early this month: “The abnormal consumption generated by people being seduced into buying things they do not really need distorts information on market demand and leads to blind production.”

The growth of the lotteries began last fall amid heady optimism that the Chinese leadership was willing, indeed eager, to tolerate a variety of economic experiments.

Lotteries Raised Capital

At first, the lotteries were used by local governments to raise capital they could not get through ordinary budget measures. On Sept. 17, for example, an evening newspaper in Canton reported that municipal officials there had issued 50,000 lottery tickets to obtain money for urban housing construction, and that the tickets were quickly sold out.

“The city plans to have similar lotteries again this month,” the newspaper said.

No Chinese official or newspaper expressed any public criticism of the lotteries, which seemed to offer something for everyone. For government officials, the lotteries were a new way to obtain revenues. For the people, they offered hope, however slight, of striking it rich, of getting something--a color television set, a refrigerator--that was otherwise out of reach.

Soon, the lotteries began to be used to promote sales. In early October, sponsors of the Peking marathon, concerned about low spectator turnout on previous occasions, organized a lottery to attract a crowd. They offered 50,000 tickets to the race at one yuan (35 cents) each. First prize was a Japanese-made refrigerator, and among the others were four color television sets, 10 washing machines and 2,500 pairs of running shoes.

“We do not want to make money from the masses,” Kang Wei of the Chinese Athletic Assn. said. “We just want to excite their interest in the marathon.”

By early winter, movie theaters, newspapers, a nationwide martial arts foundation and any number of shops had taken up the lottery idea. On the streets of Peking and Shanghai, crowds of people gathered to buy tickets or read about prizes that had been awarded.

Peaked With TV Show

The peak of the lottery’s popularity was a nationwide television show Feb. 19, the eve of Spring Festival, as the Chinese New Year is known here. The program was also the cause of the lottery’s political demise.

Traditionally, the eve of Spring Festival is an occasion for Chinese to gather in their homes for family dinners. For the past several years, the government-owned television network has put on a special all-night program of music and entertainment to celebrate the beginning of the holiday.

This year’s program was a controversial one. For the first time, it featured Hong Kong performers and Chinese entertainers singing Hong Kong-style music. In private, some Chinese viewers complained about it. The performers were interrupted at regular intervals for drawings in a nationwide lottery. Prizes included color television sets and gold and silver medals.

A week later, after the festival had ended and the nation returned to work, the People’s Daily took note of the TV program and said the lottery trend was shameful.

Most Lotteries Banned

“Will the winning of prizes serve to enrich the state or the people?” it asked, and then went on to answer the question: “The answer is no. Will it serve to reward those who have been creative or are working hard? The answer is no.”

Within three days, the television network had apologized, and the State Council, China’s Cabinet, had issued a new edict banning most lotteries. The ban did not apply to drawings by local governments for social welfare causes and to banks seeking savings deposits.

A Western diplomat said he thought the leadership was eager to crack down on the lotteries in order to prevent old-line party leaders opposed to the economic reforms from acquiring any political momentum.

“They saw the growth of the campaign against unhealthy tendencies, and they counterattacked,” he said.

Chinese officials also complained that the lotteries were being used by some shops to dump shoddy merchandise, to get rid of overstocked items or just to reap windfall profits by giving away prizes worth far less than the income from ticket sales.

“It was OK when a municipal government did it to raise money for housing,” one young Chinese government official said. “But after a while, it went too far.”