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China news tagged with: Internet cafes (41)

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Shandong County Closes Cyber Cafes
A few days ago, China Daily reported that all Internet cafes in Guanxian County, Shandong, had been closed, apparently “in a drive to drag teenagers indulged in the online world back to school and reality”:
On July 29, local police ordered all 21 Internet cafes in Guanxian county, Liaocheng of East China’s Shandong province, to suspend their business, China Youth Daily reported yesterday.
“Our purpose is to improve the quality of life for local residents,” Wang Zhenqian, deputy director of the county Party committee’s publicity department, was quoted as saying.
Citizens were concerned about how much time their young children were spending on the Internet. But teenagers also were spending more and more time in Internet cafes and getting weary of studying. This is a serious problem in Guanxian and in the whole country, he said.
“Everyone is clapping their hands in applause for what we have done. Authorities in other places want to do the same thing, but most of them don’t dare to,” he said.
ESWN translates blog posts about a local story which may have been the real impetus for trying to control online communication:
On June 9, the Family Planning Office seized a 9-month-pregnant woman who had an unauthorized pregnancy and took her to our hospital for induced abortion. There were almost 20 people from the Family Planning Office but none of her family was present. The pregnant fought with all might for the sake of her 9-month-old fetus! If the baby was born, it was fully capable of living. Her struggle and resistance with make everyone with a conscience feel sad. But who dares to usurp the government policin in Guanxian county and save the pitiful mother and child? Nobody can, because a policy that has been going on for decades cannot be overturned in a flash.
Her struggles were ultimately utile because she was with child. Even a normal person could not stop the six or seven strong men from holding her down and giving her the injection to induce abortion. She struggled to the end and a person (especially a mother) in desperation has unlimited strength!! She got free once, twice, thrice but she did not get away.
Poor mother, poor child, even the heavens can only watch. What kind of world is this! There is no humanity left!
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- October 19, 2009 9:39 PM
Illegal Internet Cafes in Firing Line
The China Daily reports that underground internet cafes are the new target for a planned police crackdown in rural areas:
”Illegal Internet bars are harming left-behind rural teenagers that lack parental care because their parents are away trying to make a living in cities,” Zhou Yongping, deputy director of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, said in a national teleconference yesterday… Zhou said local authorities would confiscate facilities and equipment belonging to illegal businesses, instead of simply punishing violators with fines. Those found violating laws would also face criminal punishment.
Tao Ran, a medical expert on Internet addiction at Beijing’s Military General Hospital, said illegal cafes lured many pupils and middle school students away from their studies.
They could access unhealthy content, including obscene and violent images and even information about gun sales and weapons, he said… Phone numbers and e-mail addresses which people can contact with tip-offs would be published in middle and primary schools, city communities and shops in the countryside from next month… Tao compared Internet bars that allow students to access harmful content to the recruiting of teenagers into prostitution and drug trafficking.
See also past CDT posts on internet control.
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- May 28, 2009 11:43 PM
New Fears over Cyber-snooping in China
New regulations require Internet cafes in Jiangxi Province to install Chinese-developed operating systems on their computers. From AP:
The new rules went into effect on November 5 and are aimed at cracking down on pirated software, said Hu Shenghua, a spokesman for the culture bureau in the city of Nanchang, Jiangxi province. Internet cafe operators are required to replace unlicensed software with legitimate copies of either Microsoft Windows or China’s Red Flag Linux operating system, while paying a fee, he said.
However, Radio Free Asia said cafes were being required to install Red Flag Linux even if they were using authorised copies of Windows. It quoted Xiao Qiang, director of the California-based China Internet Project, as saying the new rules would help the authorities to undertake heightened surveillance of the cafes.
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- December 4, 2008 11:57 AM
Chinese Authorities Enforce Switch from Microsoft
From the Radio Free Asia:
Authorities in the southeastern Chinese city of Nanchang are requiring all local Internet cafes to replace their Microsoft Windows XP operating systems with a Chinese-made system, Red Flag Linux, according to officials and Internet cafe owners.
An official with the Nanchang Cultural Discipline Team, which oversees the roughly 600 Internet cafes operating in Nanchang city, said the new operating systems were mandatory.
“We have already started installing the new software in all Internet cafes. All of them must have this new one,” the official said.
The switch was mandated by the Nanchang Cultural Management Bureau in what it said was an effort to crack down on pirated software, local sources said.
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- December 2, 2008 2:57 PM
China WoW
As previously reported on CDT, the Chinese government has a record of treating the massive popularity of World of Warcraft (WoW) and other online games as a social ill which distracts Chinese youth from their social responsibilities or, alternately, threatens the stability of a harmonious society. New research comparing U.S. and Chinese players of WoW conducted by Professor Bonnie Nardi at the University of California, Irvine offers a different view of the world’s most popular MMORPG from within Chinese society. From OCRegister.com:
The National Science Foundation has given UC Irvine $100,000 to figure out why Americans go to greater lengths than the Chinese to modify “World of Warcraft,” the hugely popular multiplayer online game produced by Blizzard Entertainment of Irvine.
About 5 million Chinese play “WoW,” which is twice the number of American players. But Americans produce far more modifications, or “mods,” to enrich the gaming experience.
“We are examining the many reasons for this disparity, including cultural and institutional factors,” says Bonnie Nardi, the UCI informatics professor who’ll conduct the study with help from doctoral student Yong Ming Kow.
In a virtual interview with the The China Beat, Nardi shares more details from her findings, including demographic observations about WoW players in China:
Bonnie Nardi: The time we spent in Internet cafes in China led us (me and my collaborators Silvia Lindtner, Yang Wang, Scott Mainwaring, He Jing, and Wenjing Liang) to see digital activity as occurring in “mixed realities” which fuse the virtual and the physical. We did not invent the term, but use it to analyze the layered experience of sitting in a café, with its comforts of food, cigarettes, soft drinks, and most importantly, other people, enmeshed at the same time in a rich digital space of enticing games, movies, social networking software, and other apps. In China, people often play games in Internet cafes with their friends, sometimes from the same immediate neighborhood. They may play awhile and then go out to dinner or for tea. They call each other on their cell phones and text and IM. It’s a very stimulating social experience comprised of physical and digital elements.
[...Bonnie Nardi:] In North America, Nick Yee found that about 23 per cent of characters played by real life males were female characters. In China there is something of a prohibition against this practice. Male players who play female characters risk being called “lady-boys.” As far as I can tell, this term (人妖 renyao) connotes transvestite or transsexual. I tried to pin down my research assistants on the exact meaning, but they were a little vague. China is a more puritanical country than the U.S., and I think they themselves (who were young women just starting graduate school) were not exactly sure of how far the connotations stretched. They definitely invoked transsexuals in trying to explain the concept to me.
[...Bonnie Nardi:] In China we also met people from varied social classes. They included students, a factory worker, a middle school teacher, a bank employee, a marketing supervisor, a vice president of design for a Chinese game company, and a venture capital broker. As mentioned, there is less age diversity among WoW players than in North America.
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- October 30, 2008 5:58 PM
China Watches Over Internet Café Customers In Web Crackdown
From The Times:
All visitors to internet cafés in Beijing are to be required to have their photographs taken in a stringent new control on the public use of cyberspace.
Hopes that the Olympic Games would usher in a relaxed approach to the internet had already been hit hard when the “Great Firewall of China” — the blocking of websites deemed subversive — was reimposed not long after foreign reporters left the country.
The temporary lifting of the firewall applied to only a few sites and Chinese citizens experienced few changes.
According to the latest rules, by mid-December all internet cafés in the main 14 city districts must install cameras to record the identities of their web surfers, who must by law be 18 or over. There are more than 250 million internet users in China, approximately ten times more than there were in 2000.
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- October 16, 2008 11:01 PM
Main photo: China Internet Cafe
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- February 27, 2008 11:08 PM
My Kid Is An Internet Addict – Wang Zhiyong
From China.org.cn:
Since Internet addiction disorder (IAD) was first introduced by Dr. Goldberg as a new type of addiction in 1995, Internet addiction has been widely covered. Research has been published; diagnostic standards as well as solutions have been proposed.
Currently in China there are 140 million Internet users. The press thoroughly discusses this issue, in particular adolescent Internet addiction. But most news articles depict the negative and pathological usage.
China Youth Daily published two articles, one written by Chen Weiwei (Èôà‰ºü‰ºü) from the Zhejiang Education Institute and the other by a Beijing resident Xiao Yunian (ËêßÈõ®Âπ¥), on August 19. They project a different point of view. They both claim that these reports are escalating prejudice against Internet use, which is in turn driving anxious parents to cut their kids off from the Internet. These biased reports are depicting juveniles as Internet victims, even stigmatizing them as addicts. They also analyzes the formation of this stigma. [Full Text]
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- August 28, 2007 3:18 AM
China Starts War with World of Warcraft Addicts – Max Brenn
Following a bar on new internet cafes, a new regulation encourages underage gamers at internet cafes to stop playing and “do suitable physical exercise.” From eFluxMedia:
Chinese authorities are targeting a national crackdown on online gamers who spend more than 3 hours daily playing, in an attempt to tone down the youngster’s addiction to popular sagas like World of Warcraft.
It seems that the “get a life!” expression is highly recommended for Chinese teenagers these days, since most of them tend to forget their “social responsibilities”. According to Chinadaily, the communist government in the most populous country in the world has begun a national crackdown on Internet caf√©s that provide access to games like World of Warcraft, Dungeon’s and Dragons or Lineage. [Full Text]
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- July 17, 2007 11:47 PM
China Bars New Internet Cafes – AP
From the Associated Press:
China will license no new Internet cafes this year while regulators carry out an industry-wide inspection, the government says, amid official concern that online material is harming young people.
Investigators will look into whether Internet cafes are improperly renting out their licenses or failing to register their customers’ identities, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce said on its Web site…
China has the world’s second-largest population of Internet users, with 137 million people online, and is on track to surpass the United States as the largest online population in two years.

[Full Text]
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- June 4, 2007 7:13 AM
Call for More Free ‘Green Internet Cafes’ for Young People – Hu Yinan
From China Daily:
The government is calling on more schools and community centers to provide free Internet services for young people.
Zhang Xiaoliang, chief of the Communist Youth League Central Committee’s rights protection division, told China Daily yesterday: “A healthy environment and healthy online content should be offered to all kids, and we hope these ‘green net bars’ will help to do that.”
Zhang said that while there had been considerable efforts made to crack down on illegal Internet cafes, doing so was not necessarily the best way to protect youngsters from inappropriate content. [Full Text]
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- May 28, 2007 8:11 PM
China Cracks Down on Sales of Internet Bar Licenses – Xinhua
View image
From Xinhua News:
The Chinese government has pledged to eradicate the sale of new selling new Internet bar licenses, which has continued despite a ban earlier this month.
Tuo Zuhai, vice director of the Ministry of Culture cultural market department, said at a meeting on Internet bars that licenses were still sold in some areas for high profits after 14 government departments, including the Ministry of Culture, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce and the Ministry of Information Industry, banned the practise. [Full Text]
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- March 20, 2007 11:36 AM
China: New Internet Cafes Barred – AFP
From AFP, via The New York Times:
China barred any more cybercafes from opening this year, the latest move to restrict the rising influence of the Internet. The authorities will not approve any Internet cafe licenses in 2007, according to a notice posted on the Culture Ministry’s Web site. There are about 113,000 registered Internet bars in China, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing government figures.[Full Text]
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- March 11, 2007 3:54 PM
China Won’t Let New Internet Cafes Open – AP
From AP:
China will not allow any new Internet cafes to open this year, state media reported Tuesday.
The Xinhua News Agency said 14 government departments, including the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Information Industry, had issued a notice saying that “in 2007, local governments must not sanction the opening of new Internet bars.”
It said there are about 113,000 Internet cafes in China. Many are smoke-filled rooms with rows of computers set up for online gaming. [Full Text]
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- March 5, 2007 11:58 PM
Internet Cafes: Premium Meat for Regulators – Xinhua

As Internet cafes have taken the brunt of the criticism of addictive gaming and computing by a large number of young Chinese, the bosses also have their complaints: endless fees or expenses to keep their business going. From Xinhua’s Tianjin, Gansu and Hebei channels, translated by CDT:
For instance in Tianjin, local Internet cafes are required, since real-name registration regime took effect, to install a few programs, such as a harmful information filtering software (Áõä‰Ω∞ËΩØ‰ª∂), 160 yuan/machine, a real-name monitoring software (Â§öÁ¶èÂèã), 165 yuan/unit and another one bundled to real-name programs (Â∏ïÂçöÊ∏©). An Internet cafe owner at Hedong district in Tianjin said that his cost for these installations was a sizeable 100,000 yuan, for his 300 machines. (Any market for piracy here?)
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- January 20, 2007 9:48 PM