DOG RACING IN SHANGHAI

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 October 1928, Page 12

DOG RACING IN SHANGHAI

A NEW GAMBLING GAME. It is generally believed that the Chinese, or rather the poorer classes in urban China, are inveterate gamblers (says the “Manchester Guardian”). That weakness would certainly seem to carry with it an ability to recognise a new gambling game when they see it, for it has not taken some of the Chinese authorities long

to see through the new “sport” of greyhound-racing. In the International Settlement at Shanghai there are already two greyhound-racing tracks and two more contemplated, but the native authorities in that city, backed by Chambers of Commerce and ratepayers’ associations, have now demanded that these “animated roulette boards” shall be put down at once on the ground they are demoralising Chinese citizens. It took many people in this country rather longer to discover where the true attraction of grey-hound-racing lay; in this matter the

immemorial East seems to have been more alert than the wide-awake West.

In the official demand for the closing of the Shanghai tracks a. heavy enough charge sheet is presented against grey-hound-racing; it is charged not only with impoverishing Chinese citizens for the benefit of foreign syndicates, but. also with being responsible for “epidemics, abductions, suicides, and bankruptcies.” It is a long list of misdemeanous, but even if it only means that the more enlightened Chinese do not want dog-racing tracks in Shanghai, the demand is not one that can be brushed aside. If many Chinese are by instinct gamblers, all the more reason why foreigners should not. cater for their darling vice. But if the Chinese in Shanghai do succeed in closing the greyhound tracks (or only in preventing the opening of new ones) it is interesting to remember that they will have done more than it is at present, possible for any local authority in this enlightened country to do.