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Ma Honggang was once a legend in the secretive, twilight world of China’s high-stakes gamblers.

Moving from city to city, he spent countless nights around card tables in the smoke-filled apartments that act as secret casinos in a country where gambling is illegal and regarded by the authorities as a serious social evil.

Now he has embarked on a different career: persuading China’s growing army of illegal gamblers to think again about what to many has become a destructive addiction.

“I’d play with criminals, although I don’t want to say what they did, as well as rich businessmen and officials,” Ma said.

What made him unique was that he hardly ever lost. An accomplished card sharp, with the sleight of hand of a professional magician, Ma can pick any card from a shuffled pack, roll dice to order or deal a winning hand of mahjong tiles.

Even more remarkable, however, is that there was never a shortage of marks for Ma to trick. Despite the fact that gambling was outlawed on the mainland after the communists took power in 1949, it is more widespread now than ever before.

Rising incomes have combined with new ways to gamble, such as foreign Internet betting Web sites, to devastating effect for a nation whose people have long been known for their addiction to games of chance.

While there are just two officially sanctioned lotteries in China, an estimated 1 trillion yuan ($146 billion) is wagered illegally each year in China — equal to the entire economic output of Beijing. It is a staggering figure for a country where 700 million people — more than half the population live in rural areas with an average income of just 4,700 yuan a year.

The gambling takes place in card and mahjong packs on street corners, in underground casinos in cities, through unofficial lotteries in the countryside and on hundreds of gambling Web sites.

Seeing the Problem

Now China is beginning to face up to an awkward problem for its communist leaders: illegal gambling has spawned huge and increasing numbers of addicts.

“Based on international statistics for countries with developed gaming industries, 2 or 3 percent of gamblers have a problem,” said Wang Xuehong, director of Peking University’s Center for Lottery Studies, who has done research on China’s problem gamblers. “In China it’s more than that, because people are still not rational when it comes to gambling.”

Ma knows that better than anyone. His biggest win was 780,000 yuan in one hour of cards and he admits deceiving the people who played with him.

“I never felt bad about cheating at cards because in my experience, all gambling is 90 percent cheating,” he said. “I don’t know why more people don’t realize that. Even when I warn people, they don’t believe me — until I show people the tricks.”

Ma has now given up gambling and has instead spent the last five months demonstrating to addicts just how easy it is for a skilled operator to rig a card, dice or mahjong game in an attempt to cure them of their desire to bet. Prompted by what he says was a realization that gambling was destructive, in March he set up the Ma Honggang Anti-Gambling Center in the north-eastern city of Shenyang in Liaoning province.

“I didn’t find it hard to stop and because I gave up gambling, I can be a good example to others,” said Ma, an unremarkable-looking man — until he has a pack of cards in his hands.

Now instead of fleecing gamers, Ma offers them free sessions in which he demonstrates how luck or skill often have little to do with whether a gambler wins or loses.

His center is both unconventional and unique because despite the huge numbers of problem gamblers in China, there is no officially sanctioned treatment for them. Instead, Beijing prefers a more draconian approach, reflecting its belief that gambling is inextricably linked to corruption.

Last year, some 600,000 people were arrested for gambling, while those who admit publicly that they need help faces the prospect of being confined to a mental hospital. Unsurprisingly, most addicts prefer to stay in a private hell of debt and despair.

All Sectors Touched

Until 2007, Yang Bin could have been a poster boy for the new middle class that has emerged in China. He ran a successful steel distribution firm in Wuhan in southern China and had an adoring wife and a newborn son. Then he started playing the Chinese version of blackjack.

“I think I’ve lost around 1.7 million yuan in the last two years,” he said. “The worst time was when I lost 200,000 yuan in one night.”

“My wife has left me,” the 32-year-old said. “She took our son back to her mother’s house. I don’t have the cash flow to buy any more stock for my business, so I’m losing a lot of orders. It took me seven years to save two million yuan, now it’s almost all gone. You could say that my life has been ruined by gambling.”

After seeing Ma on television in May, he decided to make contact in an effort to stop. “He showed me all the different ways you can cheat at cards,” Yang said. “I couldn’t believe it actually. I began to think that I might have been cheated. I used to play with a regular group and a few of them always won, while I always lost.” After Ma demonstrated his skills, Yang says he hasn’t gambled again.

Ma has no doubts about his effectiveness. “This is the best way to stop people gambling; it is better than being locked up by the police,” he said.

So far, he claims to have helped more than 700 addicts quit. Such is the lack of information available to problem gamblers in China that many, like Gao Qiang, were not even aware they were addicted.

“I was initially reluctant to come to see Mr. Ma,” said Gao, who has lost his clothing shop in Shenyang and is 80,000 yuan in debt from betting on mahjong. “I wanted to borrow more money to keep on playing. I thought if I was lucky I could win back what I lost. But my wife threatened me with a divorce and my relatives and friends wanted me to come too.

“I don’t think I’ll gamble again. Now I know that it’s too hard for me to win.”

Most of China’s problem gamblers, however, don’t have a Ma to help them.

While Ma’s one-man operation has the blessing of the local authorities, Wang Xuehong — an academic at Peking University — has been trying unsuccessfully for years to persuade the Beijing municipal government to let her open a gambling addiction center.

She has been allowed to set up China’s first help line for problem gamblers, and despite a ban on advertising the telephone number, her staff are overwhelmed by calls.

Yet they can only listen. “We can’t do anything to help them because we don’t have a treatment center,” Wang said. “If people have a really serious problem, we ask the local government if they can be admitted to a mental hospital.”

There are booming casinos in Macao, the former Portuguese colony that neighbors Hong Kong and is the sole corner of China where casino gambling is allowed. Otherwise the official lotteries are the only legal outlet for a bet.

Set up in 1987, they raise 100 billion yuan a year in revenue for Beijing. But Wang thinks that figure is dwarfed by the money wagered illicitly. “I’d estimate that 10 times more is spent on illegal gambling,” she said.

She believes the government gains so much from the lottery that it won’t admit to, or tackle, China’s gambling crisis. “Many calls are from people addicted to buying lottery tickets,” said Wang. “These are people who are going bankrupt, who have been divorced by their partners, who want to commit suicide.

“Do you think the government wants to say, ‘We’ve created a lot of trouble for society?’ So they close their eyes to the problem.”

The names of the gamblers in this story have been changed.



The Sunday Telegraph