Peking will stärker gegen die Korruption vorgehen, so die Washington Post: Tales of wealthy Chinese gambling away millions in Las Vegas have multiplied over the last decade. Estimates of the amount of losses abroad range from $2.4 billion to more than $73 billion a year if the tally includes the casinos of Macau, a former Portuguese colony now under Chinese sovereignty. The recent concern in Beijing, however, was that ever-lower ranks of party and government officials had been seen heading to casinos along the border. This raised fears that more officials, up and down the hierarchy, were using crooked money to play, so much so that bilingual wags began calling them "ganbu-lers," a pun on the Chinese word for party cadre. President Hu Jintao has repeatedly warned that fighting such corruption, along with the perception that officials are corrupt, is one of the Communist Party's most important tasks. And so the party, which banished organized gambling along with prostitution and opium when it took over in 1949, vowed to wipe out illegal betting again in the first half of 2005. The Public Security Ministry announced that it had investigated 2,000 cases involving illegal gambling since the beginning of the year and detained 4,000 people. To increase the pressure, officials announced, 13 inspection teams were sent to five provinces notorious for high-stakes gambling, including two border areas.