Police place too heavy hand on card game

During a trip to Tai'an in East China's Shandong province, eight graduating students played cards in the hotel where they were staying, betting 1 yuan (16 cents) a game. The local police said they were gambling and detained them for 15 days and fined them 3,000 yuan each, the highest fine allowed. Comments:

Gambling breaks the law and can be serious sometimes, but only if somebody has organized the gambling for profit. In the case of the graduating students, no one was running the card game for profit. The decision to give them the highest penalty is too severe.

Liu Guiming, chief editor of Democracy and Legal System magazine, June 11