Gambling fever hits China

China is launching its first nationwide lottery today, overturning a strict ban on gambling of any sort that has been in place for fifty years.

The BBC Beijing correspondent says the move has been prompted by a desperate need for cash, especially to pay for the elderly.

China has no proper state-run pension scheme to support its one-hundred-and-thirty-million pensioners -- a number which is expected to rise by the middle of the century to three-hundred-million or one-quarter of the population. People can no longer rely on their work unit or factory to look after them into old age, as used to be the case under the old centrally planned economy. The government hopes the lottery with a weekly jackpot of about one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand US dollars will raise more than one-hundred-million dollars in the first three months alone.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service