Edit: Thank you all for the answers!
I've been reading Mao since coming here and I saw this talking about gaming.
" Gaming. Where the peasant association is powerful, mahjong, dominoes and card games are completely banned.
The peasant association in the 14th District of Hsianghsiang burned two basketfuls of mahjong sets.
If you go to the countryside, you will find none of these games played; anyone who violates the ban is promptly and strictly punished. "
I guess my question is why would gaming be banned? I figured there is some cultural context that I'm missing because I would think especially during this time period it would be a way to bring people together during downtime.
(It should be noted that gambling was its own category)
Thank you for your time!
For context it's worth mentioning that in the USA and England in the 1800s to early 1900s, there was a Temperance Movement that opposed gambling like dice and card games. If this happened around the world, if anything I would attribute it to urbanization as something that made "being a gambler" (making a living off winnings in games of chance, gotten from other people) more of a thing. Larger cities and more mobility mean that you can't exhaust the pool of players quite so quickly.
Mahjong is functionally the same as a card game. It always had a gambling aspect to it. For millennia in China it was just "winning the pool" as just an incentive to play to win. The Japanese version (which may have been more widespread at the time of occupation) has a lot more aspects, bonuses, winning conditions, and multipliers. So that might be a part of it.
I'm supposing weiqi and xiangqi were not prohibited- that would really illumimate what sort of thing they were acting on.