Edit: Thank you all for the answers!
I’ve been reading Mao since coming here and I saw this talking about gaming.
" Gaming. Where the peasant association is powerful, mahjong, dominoes and card games are completely banned.
The peasant association in the 14th District of Hsianghsiang burned two basketfuls of mahjong sets.
If you go to the countryside, you will find none of these games played; anyone who violates the ban is promptly and strictly punished. "
I guess my question is why would gaming be banned? I figured there is some cultural context that I’m missing because I would think especially during this time period it would be a way to bring people together during downtime.
(It should be noted that gambling was its own category)
Thank you for your time!
because gaming here really means gambling. they were all heavily tied to gambling, opium, and other tools of capitalist and feudal oppression in china prior to the revolution.
It shows how much the social context matters. I experience card and dice games as wholesome social activities, bringing joy and connection between me, my family and friends. But in another context (especially when gambling and drugs are involved), it’s this seedy, grungy activity that is tearing apart those same connections. I don’t know enough about the era to know if that was really happening, or if Mao was succumbing to an overblown moral panic.
for sure, the real problems underlying gambling are poverty and debt. gambling offers a tempting means of escaping poverty while actually trapping most people further in debt. i’m certainly not an expert on this subject, but i would guess that illegal gambling continued to be a problem after the revolution. i can see an argument for “we need to shut this whole thing down for a few years until we can make sure the gambling rings are stamped out and the opium dealers are disarmed.”
Mao had prescience, and saw what would happen to the Chinese people if they were permitted to become
For context it’s worth mentioning that in the USA and England in the 1800s to early 1900s, there was a Temperance Movement that opposed gambling like dice and card games. If this happened around the world, if anything I would attribute it to urbanization as something that made “being a gambler” (making a living off winnings in games of chance, gotten from other people) more of a thing. Larger cities and more mobility mean that you can’t exhaust the pool of players quite so quickly.
Mahjong is functionally the same as a card game. It always had a gambling aspect to it. For millennia in China it was just “winning the pool” as just an incentive to play to win. The Japanese version (which may have been more widespread at the time of occupation) has a lot more aspects, bonuses, winning conditions, and multipliers. So that might be a part of it.
I’m supposing weiqi and xiangqi were not prohibited- that would really illumimate what sort of thing they were acting on.
The problem is gambling, not games in and of themselves. Gambling is a reactionary industry based on swindling and deceiving the poor, and millions of lives and livelihoods have been ruined over the exploitation of addictions.
Speculation: Gaming was probably a pastime inside opium dens. So while leaving it alone might sound fine if you’re banning gambling separately, it’s not fine if it enables hidden opium dens, you can ban the gaming and kill the hotspots for potential opium hangouts.
If I wanted to reduce the number of pubs in the UK I would ban pool, darts, snooker and traditional pub games, maybe even the playing of music by businesses/organisations. The target would be the premises and activities that surround the consumption of alcohol. Well that applies for a drugs epidemic like opium too right?
Banning all non-industrial uses of brass would take care of every pub immediately.
Rofl they’d just switch to something less self-cleaning and gross. Hopefully this illustrates my point though, if you have a normalised culture surrounding a drug then part of taking that drug down means you have to target all the things that enable the spaces where that drug is used. If the drug is used recreationally then organised recreational activity is the thing you end up having to target. Banning the drug isn’t enough and killing dealers isn’t enough so targeting the material conditions that create environments where the drug is disseminated is where you escalate your prohibition to.
In the early 1900s 26% of all adult males were addicted to Opium, comparing this to trying to prohibit alcohol is quite apt in the sheer scale of normalisation.
From a second hand anecdote, I do recall my grandfather saying games with a luck aspect are inferior to those without. Also he’s a huge Weiqi guy, and really likes Luzhanqi. Mahjong, dominoes and card games involve chance, whereas Weiqi, Tiaoqi, Xiangqi and Luzhanqi don’t.
I assumed it was due to the opportunity for gambling. A game without RNG would attract less (edit:) problem gambling.
It’s also infinitely harder to cheat at those type of games (chess/checkers) where 100% of the boardstate/gamestate is known to both players at all times. Card games and tile games + gambling opens up lots of accusations of and opportunities for cheating for financial gain, resulting in disputes and arguments. I can’t imagine Mao saw any of those as acceptable necessities of otherwise ‘pro-social’ games.
I never did personally get the appeal of Weiqi. It was real fucking boring to me. But nonetheless it seemed a lot more honest than even doudizhu/fight the landlord. I guess specifically card games, majiang and dominoes implies this is the case
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
(It should be noted that gambling was its own category)
it was not though? what makes you say that
They’re listed separately in the source, although I still think there’s some missing historical context (probably a strong link between “gaming” and the other two activities banned, as has been said elsewhere in the thread).
9. Peasant Bans and Prohibitions
When the peasant associations, under Communist Party leadership, establish their authority in the countryside, the peasants begin to prohibit or restrict the things they dislike. Gaming, gambling and opium-smoking are the three things that are most strictly forbidden.
Gaming. Where the peasant association is powerful, mahjong, dominoes and card games are completely banned.
The peasant association in the 14th District of Hsianghsiang burned two basketfuls of mahjong sets.
If you go to the countryside, you will find none of these games played; anyone who violates the ban is promptly and strictly punished.
Gambling. Former hardened gamblers are now themselves suppressing gambling; this abuse, too, has been swept away in places where the peasant association is powerful.
Opium-smoking. The prohibition is extremely strict. When the peasant association orders the surrender of opium pipes, no one dares to raise the least objection. In Liling County one of the evil gentry who did not surrender his pipes was arrested and paraded through the villages.
The peasants’ campaign to "disarm the opium-smokers’! is no less impressive than the disarming of the troops of Wu Pei-fu and Sun Chuan-fang [27] by the Northern Expeditionary Army. Quite a number of venerable fathers of officers in the revolutionary army, old men who were opium-addicts and inseparable from their pipes, have been disarmed by the “emperors” (as the peasants are called derisively by the evil gentry). The “emperors” have banned not only the growing and smoking of opium, but also trafficking in it. A great deal of the opium transported from Kweichow to Kiangsi via the counties of Paoching, Hsianghsiang, Yuhsien and Liling has been intercepted on the way and burned. This has affected government revenues. As a result, out of consideration for the army’s need for funds in the Northern Expedition, the provincial peasant association ordered the associations at the lower levels “temporarily to postpone the ban on opium traffic”. This, however, has upset and displeased the peasants.
I believe gaming is used more for when there’s a “skill” element in the mix that can have an impact on your performance - stuff like card and dice games. Gambling as a separate category is more of betting and lottery kind of thing.
I think you mean prohibited, prohibitive would mean it was too expensive or resource-intensive to do
Ah yes sorry. My dyslexia has been shit more then usual and I’ve been using my auto correct which…isn’t always the best.
no need to apologize I just wanted to make sure your question was understood
it was prohibited because it was prohibitive ;)
