Supreme People's Court publishes research report on cross-border gambling governance

China's Supreme People's Court published a research report on cross-border gambling governance on 18 August 2023, written by its Fifth Criminal Division, which reported a large increase in cross-border gambling crime since 2021 and set out plans for coordination, guidance and rule-making¹.

The report said the division carried out a special study of cross-border gambling governance, gathering information and views from various parties¹. It found that cross-border gambling crime has diversified, with gambling groups moving operations from physical casinos to hidden online operations and using blockchain, encrypted communications and virtual currency to evade enforcement¹. Online gambling, it said, has low operating costs, servers located overseas, convenient fund settlement and relative ease of evading crackdowns¹.

On case numbers, the report stated:

The report said online cross-border casino operations are frequent, with many major cases, high sums involved and large social impact¹. It described a long criminal chain whose technical support, payment settlement and promotion links have spawned upstream and downstream industries including help with information network crime, infringement of citizens' personal information, underground banking and money laundering through "running points"¹.

The report listed four areas of difficulty: enforcement, case adjudication, coordination and application of law¹. Cross-border factors, it said, cause problems in filing cases, obtaining evidence and freezing and seizing funds, and payment services combining banks and third-party payment methods add to the difficulty¹. It said the boundary between the crime of organizing participation in gambling outside China and the crime of running a casino is unclear, and that the thresholds for "huge amount" and "serious circumstances" for the organizing offense are not clear¹. That offense, Article 303(3) of the Criminal Law, does not set a penalty directly but refers to the preceding paragraph, making it a referential provision¹.

What it means for players

The report is a statement of the court system's own difficulties rather than a new rule, so nothing in it changes what is legal or illegal for players in China. It confirms that authorities treat cross-border gambling, including online play through overseas servers, as a continuing enforcement priority, and that cases against organizers and participants are expected to stay at a high level in 2023¹. The report notes that the offense of organizing participation in gambling outside China carries no separate penalty scale of its own and that key sentencing thresholds are unclear, which means outcomes for defendants in such cases have not been settled by this document¹. For Chinese citizens who gamble on cross-border sites, the report offers no new guidance on individual liability. The wider legal position is set out in the site's guide to gambling laws in Asia and to whether you can gamble in China.

What happens next

The report set out six work plans¹:

• Strengthening communication and coordination with relevant departments and analyzing possible problems in advance¹
• Issuing documents with relevant departments at an appropriate time to build consensus on how cross-border gambling offenses are characterized and how sentences are balanced¹
• Improving contact mechanisms between courts at all levels and strengthening trial guidance in major cases¹
• Building a multi-party research and assessment platform to provide early warning information¹
• Feeding social governance problems found in trials back to departments through judicial suggestions¹
• Expanding legal publicity through public trials and typical cases¹

No dates were given for any of these steps¹.