Jeez, China likes to talk a lot about internet addiction, but maybe the relevant ministries should be turning their gaze towards a more analogue form of entertainment: Mahjong. In Chengdu, netizens reported that whole tables of Mahjong addicts continued playing their games, even as an old man (and fellow Mahjong player) fainted, was attended to by emergency services, declared dead and wheeled away by a funeral car.
A video of the incident appeared on the internet, showing the old man collapsing to the ground in a teahouse in Chengdu. In the video (which you can see here), a nurse tries to revive the old man, and later declares him dead. His daughter runs to the scene and starts screaming, telling the nurse that the man is her father. People gather and crowd around them… but the mahjong table next to the dead man continues as if nothing’s happening.
Said the emergency services worker, Lao Peng, “When I got there, the old man was already dead. But the table next to him continued from the beginning to the end (of the game)… I could barely stand to look at them.”
With the recent case of a woman developing deep-vein thrombosis from too many hours of sitting at the mahjong table, and the news that Shanghai’s elderly are using cocaine and other drugs to fuel them through mahjong nights, how are there no Mahjong Addiction Camps again?