In China, if It Looks Like Gambling, Odds Are It’s Not

What was occurring the other afternoon near the finish line at the Beijing Jockey Club looked suspiciously like gambling.

A clutch of railbirds was debating the merits of the ponies in the fourth race. Get Rich Quick had a prosperous-sounding name. But the spectators, mostly local fellows who knew all the horses and jockeys well, settled on a 3-to-1 favorite named Call of the Wild--which won handily.

As the happy crew skipped off to the “prize redemption counter” to collect winnings, it turned out that this was not, technically, gambling at all.

Gambling is still illegal in China, where it was classified as one of the “six evils”--along with drugs, prostitution, bride selling, pornography and superstition--when the Communist Party came to power in 1949.

To avoid this nettlesome moral and legal hurdle, the owners of the Beijing Jockey Club have labeled their weekend races “intelligence competitions,” in which participants “guess” which horses are smart enough to finish first, or in the case of an intelligence trifecta, savvy enough to finish first, second and third, respectively.

The equine “intelligence competitions”--which are also popular in Guangzhou in southern China--are one of several ways that entrepreneurs use creative rhetoric to skirt the national ban on gambling and feed the growing public demand to bet.

Although it is nowhere near the scale that existed in the pre-Communist era--when Shanghai alone had three parimutuel dog tracks as well as a world-famous horse track--gambling appears to be making a steady comeback as China’s prosperity increases. The craze includes everything from giant “charity” lotteries to cricket fights. In a cricket market in Shandong province, promising fighting crickets can cost as much as a cow.

With a wink from local police, many hotels offer private rooms for mah-jongg games where pots can be as high as $50 a deal. Taxi drivers spend their waiting time engaged in street-corner poker games. Many of the country’s arcades feature video games, including an electronic version of mah-jongg, that pay winners in cash.

Earlier this year in Shanghai, Pepsi-Cola got into the act. For 10 weeks beginning in February, every Pepsi sold in the country’s largest city carried a number under each bottle cap. Pepsi announced one number each working day. Winners received prizes ranging from $60 to $600.

Not to be outdone, Budweiser co-sponsored the recent $25,000-purse Beijing Derby horse race. Young Chinese women wearing cotton miniskirts emblazoned with the Budweiser logo circulated in the large crowd selling cans of beer and distributing Bud key chains.

Communist authorities occasionally make a meek effort to crack down on this trend. In March, Beijing police raided 51 video-game parlors with gambling machines and arrested 21 people. But by this month, the Beijing Youth Daily reported, most of the parlors were back in action. The Ministry of Public Security reported that China now has 100,000 video arcades with 700,000 machines--about 60% of which are betting games.

The Beijing regime has proved itself adept at squelching political dissent. But its efforts to enforce anti-gambling laws are much less rigorous. Part of the reason is that the political leadership obviously has mixed feelings about gaming for money.

At the Beijing Jockey Club, a one-hour drive from the capital on the road to the Great Wall, the calligraphy over the entrance was penned by Tian Jiyun, vice chairman of the National People’s Congress. Honorary members, listed on a scroll on one wall, include a Politburo member, a vice governor of the state bank, the vice mayor of Beijing and the son-in-law of senior leader Deng Xiaoping.

For good or bad, gambling is a tradition here dating back at least 4,000 years. Moreover, the leaders look with envy at the tax revenues generated from gambling in neighboring Hong Kong and Macao.

For example, the two racetracks operated by the Hong Kong Jockey Club are among the most lucrative in the world. In the past year, betting on races at the Sha Tin and Happy Valley racetracks totaled more than $10 billion. The tax revenues were enough to support the entire budget of Hong Kong’s 27,500-strong police force.

Hong Kong will revert to Chinese control next summer, Macao in 1999. In neither case have authorities in Beijing shown any inclination to intervene in the thriving horse racing ventures. To pave the way for the transition, “Royal” was dropped from the named of the Hong Kong Jockey Club and a China-born businessman, Lawrence Wong, was named its head, replacing a retired British army general.

The main hitch in China is this troublesome bit about gambling being illegal and its prohibition a main tenet of the Communist moral code. “Before liberation,” explained a “Guide to Horse Racing” on sale at the Beijing track, “horse racing in China was influenced by the invasion and insults of imperialist aggressors. Betting got out of control . . . tricks and ruses were used, bettors were cheated and fell prey to organized crime.”

As with many other aspects of contemporary society here, the way around the problem is creative linguistics.

When advertised or featured in newspaper accounts, lotteries are described as “social welfare projects,” in which citizens participate not for the rich bounty of prizes but to benefit disabled children or other good causes.

Similarly, the Beijing Jockey Club--a fully computerized racing operation with electronic tote board and concrete grandstand--is not a parimutuel gambling operation that on weekends sometimes draws crowds of more than 20,000 bettors. Until recently, the sign stretching over the finish line read: “Resolutely Enforce the Central Committee’s Strict Injunction Against Gambling.”

“Beijing is a little sensitive about gambling,” said Li Yinyong, a Jockey Club public relations specialist who helps entertain big spenders in the air-conditioned top-floor clubhouse. “We call this ‘intelligence competition,’ and it is easy to construe it as such.”

For example, she said, it would be intelligent for the foreign guest to avoid betting on a horse named Mercedes 600 in the seventh race, no matter how much he liked the name.

A more intelligent guess, she said, was the No. 8 steed, a scrawny Mongolian pony named Wild Wolf.

Wild Wolf paid off smartly at 9 to 1.