The Sociology of Gambling in China is the result of years of teaching and research by Professor TJ Cheng at the University of Macau. This bold and far-sighted work attempts to analyze gambling behaviour in a systematic, all-round and multi-perspective manner.

The Chinese are known throughout the world as avid gamblers with a long history of participation in games of chance. Historians have documented wagering on such games as far back as the early Chinese dynasties. Despite measures by ancient Chinese rulers to contain gambling, it proliferated, and Chinese games have evolved and multiplied since then. Desmond Lam provides a unique look into the little-known world of Chinese gambling from historical, cultural, psychological, and social perspectives.Chinese gamblers regularly patronize casinos in the United States, Canada, and Australia. The recent expansion of gambling in East Asia has attracted much global media attention. Macau, the only place in China where casino gambling is now legal, easily surpasses Las Vegas as the world's largest casino gaming market. Each year, Chinese from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan account for almost 90 percent of visitors to Macau.The expansion of the Chinese gambling industry has brought about much harm to Chinese communities, despite all of the development it has also stimulated. This book is the first to examine the beliefs, motivations, attitudes, and behaviors of Chinese gamblers, and will be of interest to students of history and sociology, as well as those studying the history and culture of China.

This book critically discusses the psychology of Chinese gambling from a cultural perspective. In particular, it investigates the history of gambling, the prevalence of gambling in China, and the personality of Chinese gamblers and explores how the Chinese culture has contributed to the development of gambling and gambling problems. Further, it examines specific evidence-based treatment for Chinese problem gamblers and provides a therapeutic model that is tailored to their needs and psychology. This book useful for students and academics conducting research on Chinese gamblers and the treatments that work for them.

This is the second in a series of books intended to review and evaluate the most popular and influential explanations for gambling and the many research studies that have been conducted to confirm or refute them. This book focuses on the contributions of specialists in the social sciences, most of whom are convinced that gambling is a consequence of the social or subcultural environment in which the gambler lives. To further the understanding of why people gamble, investigators went to places where gambling occurred and spent time among and interacted with the gamblers. Some attended Gamblers Anonymous meetings and others became participant observers in gambling establishments by becoming employed as roulette croupiers or card dealers. Topics covered include the gambler's point of view, the researcher's point of view, social structure, economics, statistical tests of earlier ideas, special populations, ``armchair'' theories, gambling and the public, problem correlates, and risk factors. In addition, a critique of the qualitative and quantitative studies involving survey research methods and interview research methods is given that provides theoretical explanations for why people gamble. Numerous results from geographical surveys are provided, as well as tables that examine the research of problem gambling.

machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two. --

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. Gambling is both a multi-billion-dollar international industry and a ubiquitous social and cultural phenomenon. It is also undergoing significant change, with new products and technologies, regulatory models, changing public attitudes and the sheer scale of the gambling enterprise necessitating innovative and mixed methodologies that are flexible, responsive and ‘agile’. This book seeks to demonstrate that researchers should look beyond the existing disciplinary territory and the dominant paradigm of ‘problem gambling’ in order to follow those changes across territorial, political, technical, regulatory and conceptual boundaries. The book draws on cutting-edge qualitative work in disciplines including geography, organisational studies, sociology, East Asian studies and anthropology to explore the production and consumption of risk, risky places, risk technologies, the gambling industry and connections between gambling and other kinds of speculation such as financial derivatives. In doing so it addresses some of the most important issues in contemporary social science, including: the challenges of studying deterritorialised social phenomena; globalising technologies and local markets; regulation as it operates across local, regional and international scales; and the rise of games, virtual worlds and social media.

This biographical study of one of China's leading social scientists follows his life history, and includes a bibliography of his books and articles. Trained in London under Malinowski, Fei Xiaotong achieved eminence in the 1930s and 1940s for his pioneering studies of Chinese peasant life and for his popular articles, which stirred a wide audience in China to an awareness of social and political problems. A non-Marxist who came to sympathize with the Communists, Fei was gradually constrained in his activities after the Revolution until, in the 1950s, a massive propaganda campaign vilified him as a bourgeois rightist intellectual. Almost twenty years of silence and disgrace followed. Following the death of Mao, Fei suddenly reemerged as a leader in the effort to revitalize the social sciences in China. The story of Fei's life told here is, in a sense, the story of Westernized intellectuals in China at a time of peasant revolution. His writings enunciate the views of a sensitive observer of Chinese and Western society during that period of dramatic change.

Macau History and Society illuminates the early Portuguese maritime exploration along China's south coast, political and economic development in Macau, and current social problems. The book makes significant contributions to a political sociology of Macau, emphasizing how different civilizations and cultures interacted with one another, and explores how a new Macau identity can be constructed. Democratization has been a never-ending process in Macau since the 1500's. Macau's experience indicates that sovereignty has been shared rather than exclusive. Although civilizations and cultures do clash, they also cooperate. But the Macau model is deeply flawed - Hao contends that Macau needs to build a new multicultural identity, and a cosmopolitan political and economic identity.

This book examines the interplay of two sets of policies: the Chinese government's policies to its borderlands and international relations. It proposes a conceptual framework and argues that China's policymakers fail to make complete use of the opportunities in the borderlands for accomplishing foreign policymakers' agenda to strengthen China's relations with other countries, neighboring ones in particular. As a result, these foreign policies reflect the political elites' inadequate consideration of the negative impact of these policies on the borderlands, and underscore their worry for territorial disintegration. Therefore these policies center on the pursuit of central control through exercising administrative-military coercion, making the borderlands economically dependent, standardizing the cultural identity, and indoctrinating CCP-defined ideology. The challenges of the borderlands to the national integration are exaggerated so much that political elites pursued control and standardization at the expense of the identification of many people in borderlands with the regime, China's international image and the relations with its neighbouring countries.

This classic in the annals of village studies will be widely read and debated for what it reveals about China's rural dynamics as well as the nature of state power, markets, the military, social relations, and religion. Built on extraordinarily intimate and detailed research in a Sichuan village that Isabel Crook began in 1940, the book provides an unprecedented history of Chinese rural life during the war with Japan. It is an essential resource for all scholars of contemporary China.