… Counter to what the government and the media argue – that internet cafes are places of moral corruption – my observations revealed that cafes are places of safety, stability and comfort for migrants living in city that seemed at times hostile to them.

It’s totally new – migrants accessing networked digital technologies, coordinating with each other online, and creating new communities. For the first time ever, non-elite users have access to the same technologies as elite users.

People are using cellphones and internet cafes to create the middle-class/elite identity they desire.

Illustrating this, the slideshow includes a poster for a computer school where migrants who may lack formal education can learn to program.

The abundance of these kind of colleges reflect how migrants are trying to reinvent their lives through opportunities found on the informal market. With all these migrants learning programming languages, they are unleashing a lot of human capital.

See also Wang’s account of “How I Was Treated on the Subway While Doing Fieldwork as a Migrant Worker”, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cell phones, Internet cafes, migrant workers, rural urban divide
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“From the point of view of the common people, this policy is unfair,” said Wang Bo, the owner of L’Infusion, a cafe that features crepes, waffles and the companionship of several dozing cats. “It’s just an effort to control the flow of information ….”

The new measures, it would appear, are designed to eliminate a loophole in “Internet management” as it is called, one that has allowed laptop- and iPad-owning college students and expatriates, as well as the hip and the underemployed, to while away their days at cafes and lounges surfing the Web in relative anonymity. It is this demographic that has been at the forefront of the microblogging juggernaut, one that has revolutionized how Chinese exchange information in ways that occasionally frighten officials ….

One bookstore owner said she had already disconnected the shop’s free Wi-Fi, and not for monetary reasons. “I refuse to be part of an Orwellian surveillance system that forces my customers to disclose their identity to a government that wants to monitor how they use the Internet,” said the woman, who feared that disclosing her name or that of her shop would bring unwanted attention from the authorities.

China Daily noted that the new requirement, which is similar to existing rules for Internet cafés, is to spread nationwide:

A report in Beijing News said the public security department revealed that the regulation has been introduced in the capital and will be applied across the country.

Cafe owners contacted by China Daily reporters in Shanghai, and in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, said they had been notified of the new measure.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, Hangzhou, Internet cafes, Internet surveillance, microblogging, Shanghai, Zhejiang
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Cybercafes in China that admit three or more underage patrons will have their licences revoked under the government’s latest effort to tighten controls on web access in the world’s largest online market.

The measure will also be applied to establishments that give rise to “major malignant cases” through admitting any number of underage customers — those under 18 — according to the rules posted on the culture ministry’s website.

The new regulations, posted on Tuesday, did not specify what would constitute a “major malignant case.”

© cctvcctv for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet cafes, Internet control
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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!

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: forced abortion, Internet cafes, local power, Shandong
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 ”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.

© cschultz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet cafes, Internet Society of China
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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.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet cafes, Internet surveillance
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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.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet cafes, microsfot, Nanchang
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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 (?? 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.

© dwang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet cafes, WoW
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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.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, Internet cafes, Internet control
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© Wu Nan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet cafes, photos
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