China treats Internet ‘addicts’ - and dissidents - sternly

[Al-khiyal]

Leaders see ‘a grave social problem’; treatment includes electric shocks

DAXING, China - Sun Jiting spends his days locked behind metal bars in this military-run installation, put there by his parents. The 17-year-old high school student is not allowed to communicate with friends back home, and his only companions are psychologists, nurses and other patients. Each morning at 6:30, he is jolted awake by a soldier in fatigues shouting, "This is for your own good!"

Sun's offense: Internet addiction.

Alarmed by a survey that found that nearly 14 percent of teens in China are vulnerable to becoming addicted to the Internet, the Chinese government has launched a nationwide campaign to stamp out what the Communist Youth League calls "a grave social problem" that threatens the nation.

Few countries have been as effective historically in fighting drug and alcohol addiction as China, which has been lauded for its successes, as well as criticized for harsh techniques.

Now the country is turning its attention to fighting another, supposed addiction - one that has been blamed in the state-run media for a murder over virtual property earned in an online game, for a string of suicides and for the failure of youths in their studies.

The Chinese government in recent months has joined South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam in taking measures to try to limit the time teens spend online. It has passed regulations banning youths from Internet cafes and has implemented control programs that kick teens off networked games after five hours.

There's a global controversy over whether heavy Internet use should be defined as a mental disorder, with some psychologists, including a handful in the United States, arguing that it should be. Backers of the notion say the addiction can be crippling, leading people to neglect work, school and social lives.

But no country has gone quite as far as China in embracing the theory and mounting a public crusade against Internet addiction. To skeptics, the campaign dovetails a bit too nicely with China's broader effort to control what its citizens can see on the Internet. The Communist government runs a massive program that limits Web access, censors sites and seeks to control online political dissent. Internet companies like Google have come under heavy criticism abroad for going along with China's demands.

In the Internet-addiction campaign, the government is helping to fund eight in-patient rehabilitation clinics across the country.

Mild electric shocks

The clinic in Daxing, a suburb of Beijing, the capital, is the oldest and largest, with 60 patients on a normal day and as many as 280 during peak periods. Few of the patients, who range in age from 12 to 24, are here willingly. Most have been forced to come by their parents, who are paying upward of $1,300 a month - about 10 times the average salary in China - for the treatment.

Led by Tao Ran, a military researcher who built his career by treating heroin addicts, the clinic uses a tough-love approach that includes counseling, military discipline, drugs, hypnosis and mild electric shocks.

Tao said the clinic is based on the idea that there are many similarities between his current patients and those he had in the past.

In terms of withdrawal: "If you let someone go online and then he can't go online, you may see a physical reaction, just like someone coming off drugs." And in terms of resistance: "Today you go half an hour, and the next day you need 45 minutes. It's like starting with drinking one glass and then needing half a bottle to feel the same way."

Located on an army training base, the Internet-addiction clinic is distinct from the other buildings on campus because of the metal grates and padlocks on every door and the bars on every window.

On the first level are 10 locked treatment rooms geared toward treating teen patients suffering from disturbed sleep, lack of motivation, aggression, depression and other problems. Unlike the rest of the building, which is painted in blues and grays and kept cold to keep the teens alert, these rooms are sunny and warm.

Inside Room No. 8 are toys and other figurines that the teens can play with while psychologists watch. Room 10 contains rows of fake machine guns that the patients use for role-play scenarios that are supposed to bridge the virtual world with the real one.

Room No. 4 is made up to look like home, with rattan furniture and fake flowers, to provide a comfortable place for counselors to talk to the teens. The staff tries to blend into the artificial environment. Before meeting with a patient, one counselor swapped her olive military uniform for a motherly cardigan and plaid skirt.

Among the milder cases are those of Yu Bo, 21, from Inner Mongolia, and Li Yanjiang, 15, from Hebei province. Both said that they used to spend four to five hours a week online and their daily lives weren't affected but that their parents wanted them to cut their computer usage to zero so they could study. Yu said he agreed to come because he wanted to train himself. Li said it was because he just wanted to "get away from my parents."

Perceived as a more serious case is that of He Fang, 22, a college student from the western region of Xinjiang. The business administration major said his grades tanked when he started playing online games several hours a night. The clinic "has mainly helped me change the way I think," he said. "It's not about getting away from pressure but facing it and dealing with it."

Before Sun, the 17-year-old, who is from the city of Cangzhou, checked into the clinic about a month ago, he said, he was sometimes online playing games for 15 hours nonstop. "My life was not routine - day and night I was messed up," he said.

In December, he concluded that school just "wasn't interesting" and stopped attending. His parents were furious and complained that he didn't have a goal. Exasperated, they eventually checked him into the clinic.

Since he's been there, Sun said, he's decided to finish high school, attend college and then work at a private company, perhaps becoming an "authority figure" one day. With the help of a counselor, he's mapped out a life plan from now until he's 84.

Sun's father and mother, Sun Fengxiang and Xu Ying, both 41 and accountants, say their son's counselors have told them he's behaving well - playing basketball, reading books about success - but they are unsure whether he's really been cured.

"His language shows that he has changed, but we'll see" when Sun gets home, his father said.

No one is comfortable talking about the third floor of the clinic, where serious cases - usually two or three at a time - are housed. Most have been addicted to the Internet for five or more years, Tao said, are severely depressed and refuse counseling. One sliced his wrists but survived. These teens are under 24-hour supervision.

‘Their souls are gone to the online world’

Tao said he believes 70 percent of the teens, after one to three months of treatment, will go home and lead normal lives, but he's less optimistic about the third-floor patients. "Their souls are gone to the online world," he said.

Earlier this month, four teens fled their dorm rooms and jumped in a taxi. They made it to a train station before soldiers caught them, according to Li Jiali, a military guard. They were isolated and asked to write reports about why their actions were wrong.

Guo Tiejun, a school headmaster turned psychologist who runs an Internet-addiction research center in Shanghai, said the military-run clinic goes too far in treating Internet addicts like alcohol and drug addicts.

He said that he has treated several former patients of the Daxing clinic and that one mother told him it was simply "suffering for a month" that did not help her son. He advocates a softer approach. Guo said he believes that the root of the problem is loneliness and that the most effective treatment is to treat the teens "like friends."

"Our conclusion is that kids who get addicted in society have some kind of disability or weakness. They can't make friends, can't fulfill their desire of social communication, so they go online," Guo said.

Guo is especially critical of the use of medications - which include antidepressants, antipsychotics, and a variety of other pills and intravenous drips - for Internet addiction because, he said, that approach treats symptoms, not causes.

Tao and his team of 15 doctors and nurses defended the treatment methods. He said that while some clinics depend wholly on medications - in one experiment conducted in Ningbo, a city south of Shanghai, suspected Internet addicts were given the same pills as drug addicts - only one out of five patients at the Daxing clinic receive prescription drugs. Tao did agree with Guo that Internet addiction is usually an expression of deeper psychological problems.

"We use these medicines to give them happiness," Tao said, "so they no longer need to go on the Internet to be happy."

Still, for all the high-tech treatments available to Sun at the clinic, the one that he says helped him most was talking. He looks forward to returning to school and getting on with his life.

The first task on his agenda when he gets home: get online. He needs to tell his worried Internet friends where he was these past few weeks.

China treats Internet ‘addicts’ sternly

[Al-khiyal]

China will ban the opening of new internet cafes from this July in a government campaign to clamp down on online addiction and juvenile crime.

The state media said today that the freeze is designed to protect young people from the harmful influence of the web, but freedom-of-expression organisations say it is a fresh attempt by the Communist government to control the spread of politically sensitive information.

China has one of the world's fastest growing and most tightly censored internet markets. Last year, the number of users increased by 23% to 137 million people. In two years, it is expected to overtake the US as the biggest online population on the planet.

But the authorities are increasingly concerned about the negative effects of the web, which has been blamed for school delinquency, teenage crime and youth suicide.

A recent survey by the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that teenagers are getting addicted to the internet at a younger age than in any other country. About 13% of users under the age of 18 played or chatted online for more than 38 hours a week - the definition of addiction. Last year, Shanghai opened the country's first shelter for addicts.

Many play online games at the country's 113,000 cybercafes, which are often portrayed in the media as a breeding ground for crime. The issue has been raised at this year's National People's Congress - the Chinese parliament. "It is common to see students from primary and middle schools lingering in internet bars overnight, puffing on cigarettes and engrossed in online games," NPC deputy Yu Wen was quoted as saying.

In January, President Hu Jintao ordered Chinese internet regulators to promote a "healthy online culture" to protect social stability.

Under regulations announced by the Xinhua news agency today, local governments will not be allowed to issue new internet cafe licenses this year. Businesses that have already received planning approval must be completed by June 30.

International free speech campaigners said the freeze was not just aimed at curbing addiction to online games, but restricting access to information about Tibet, Taiwan, Falun Gong and websites that expose China's human rights abuses.

"There is something more behind this," said Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders. "When the authorities try to justify their internet policy, they always use the excuse of protecting children. But in China, this is not the whole story. They also block news websites."

He said the freeze appeared to be a new stage in a prolonged crackdown against small, independent new cybercafes, which are harder to control than large chains.

"At the big chains, the government can insist that IDs be shown for all users, certain words be blocked and monitoring software be installed. But when you are looking at thousands of small cybercafes, it become much more difficult."

Since 2002, the government has tightened regulations and closed down thousands of small internet cafes.

China bans opening of new internet cafes

[piccolomondo]

Do you take your freedom to surf the web for granted? I’m sure we all do and I’m sure most of us have tasted what it is to be blocked when viewing innocent web sites at work. It’s sort of sour with a bitter after taste.

"Your URL is Blocked!"

Well then you can imagine what it must be like for Internet savvy surfers in China; a country notorious for censoring the Internet.

China has some of the most sophisticated firewalls in the world, Great Firewall of China lets you check if your website is blocked in China.

[piccolomondo]

China's General Administration of Press and Publication was formulating new rules to further regulate internet publishing, including blogs.

The SMH reporting on a Beijing Morning Post article quoted Long saying "We must recognize that in an era when the internet is developing at a breakneck pace, government oversight and control measures and means are facing new tests" to China's National Parliament, going on to single out blogs as a particular challenges.

Remarkably, Long went on to say that despite the new regulations, "citizens' freedom of expression would be fully protected".

The Chinese Government already goes to great lengths in censoring what their bloggers publish, with bloggers currently subject to three layers of censorship according to a recent Asia Media report, ["Internet police keep tight grip on blogs: China's 'upper authorities' are a secret labyrinth world of dozens of administrative departments responsible for censoring the Internet, particularly blogs... "], initial software generated/ imposed censorship based on prohibited words, a second layer performed by a special team of censorship editors who read all blogs posts and delete offensive content that the software missed, and a third layer which in controlled by internet police officers (ed note: seriously!), officials from the Central Publicity Department, the State Council Information Office, the Ministry of Information Technology, or local communications administrations who also have the power to delete entire blogs, not just offending articles.

[901am]

[piccolomondo]

China is not known for its moderation. From mammoth construction projects to extreme public health measures, the government's reaction to perceived problems or obstacles is usually big, fast, and mildly frightening to outside observers. So, it should come as no surprise that official concern about overly-enthusiastic Internet use by teenagers has come to its logical conclusion in teen bootcamps.

Via China Digital Times, a look inside one of the camps:

Curing Internet addiction kids in China

There are two possible interpretations here. One is that this is a classic overreaction to a small-scale social problem. The Chinese government reflexively distrusts the chaos and independent nature of the Internet, and it's a small step from there to equating the medium with dangerously substances like alcohol and heroin.

A more menacing possibility lurks, however. China has recently proclaimed a new military doctrine dubbed "informationalization," which basically means dragging the military into the Internet age. It is also actively seeking ways to counter U.S. technological superiority. What better way to do this than to recruit obsessive and accomplished online gamers? The military will give these kids purpose, discipline, and exposure to sunlight for the first time. In return, they may be able to draw on their talents in a future cyber conflict.

[Al-khiyal]

Early one Sunday morning in 2002, a phone rings in Yu Ling's Beijing duplex. She's cleaning upstairs; her son is asleep, while downstairs, her husband, Wang Xiaoning, is on the computer. Wang writes about politics, anonymously e-mailing his online e-journals to a group of Yahoo users. He's been having problems with his Yahoo service recently. He thinks it's a technical issue. This is the day he learns he's wrong.

Wang picks up the phone: "Yes?"

"Are you home?" asks the unfamiliar voice on the other end.

"Yes."

The line goes dead.

Moments later, government agents swarm through the front door - 10 of them, some in uniform, some not. They take Wang away. They take his computers and disks. They shove an official notice into Yu's hands, tell her to keep quiet, and leave. This is how it's done in China. This is how the internet police grab you.

Five years later, Yu, 55, sits in the dining room of a small house in Fairfax and weeps softly. She is a slight woman - 100 pounds and barely 5 feet tall in slippers. Her eyes betray her exhaustion; but she is determined, too. She carries a thick stack of notes with her, and she has scrawled more on her left hand.

"Yahoo betrayed my husband and deprived him of freedom," Yu says through a translator, her voice trembling. "Yahoo must learn its lesson."

Yu's husband is now in Beijing Prison No. 2, serving a 10-year sentence for inciting subversion with his pro-democracy internet writings. According to the written court verdict, the Chinese government convicted Wang, in part, on evidence provided by Yahoo.

After a year of preparation, Yu flew into Washington, D.C., last week for one purpose: to find a lawyer and sue the internet giant. She told her story to Wired News in the Virginia headquarters of The China Information Center, a nonprofit advocacy group headed by former dissident Harry Wu, who helped arrange Yu's travel to the United States.

Now that she's here, Yu says she's not leaving until she has held Yahoo accountable. Her life, as she puts it, is "broken." Without Wang, she doesn't go for walks anymore, once a favorite pastime. She no longer takes vacations with her friends. It's hard for her to look at happy couples.

"I cannot think about the past together with my husband," she says. "I can only hide it in my heart. Without my husband, I never have a full meal. I don't feel whole."

Legal experts are doubtful of Yu's chances in court. But her presence in the United States puts an inescapable human face on the pain caused by the uneasy alliances American technology companies have forged in the last five years with China's repressive regime. These partnerships are the price of admission to China's booming market, but they are not without their casualties.

It's also a trade-off that Yahoo is not alone in making. To comply with government requirements, Google's China search engine blocks access to sites the government deems objectionable. Microsoft launched its Chinese blogging service in 2005 with filters that prohibited sensitive words such as freedom and democracy in blog titles. And Cisco supplies internet backbone equipment the Chinese government uses in the so-called Great Firewall that shields citizens from websites about Tibet and the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Technology firms are "compromising their duties as responsible corporate citizens," Rep. Chris Smith (R-New Jersey) charged in a blistering opening statement during congressional hearings on the issue last year. "Women and men are going to the gulag and being tortured as a direct result of information handed over to Chinese officials."

Yahoo and its subsidiaries, which provide web mail and the Yahoo Groups service to the Chinese market, have faced the harshest criticism. The company has been called out no fewer than four times by human rights groups for complying with Chinese government demands for sensitive information about journalists and online dissidents. Writers such as Shi Tao, Li Zhi and Jiang Lijun are all in prison for "crimes" similar to Wang's - and Yahoo allegedly helped put each of them there.

"We are required to follow the laws of those countries and that's what we've done," says Jim Cullinan, a Yahoo spokesman. "Law enforcement agencies in China and elsewhere don't explain to us or telecom companies or anyone the reason why they're demanding specific information. We can't tell the difference between a legitimate national security issue and something else."

Cullinan says Yahoo is strongly opposed to repression of free speech and is working to develop a set of operating principles to guide its engagement in countries with repressive governments. He adds that Yahoo had not heard of Wang's case until now, though it was widely reported last year.

"We haven't seen the court documents," he says. "But we condemn what happened."

The court's verdict clearly illustrates that Yahoo had a role in the case. The court writes that a Yahoo subsidiary, Yahoo China, first blocked Wang's Yahoo group in 2001. Yahoo Hong Kong, a separate subsidiary, then submitted written testimony linking that group to a specific Yahoo e-mail address in China. Cullinan disputes parts of the court's account. "There is no exchange of information between Yahoo Hong Kong and mainland security forces," he says.

On Wednesday, Hong Kong's privacy commission cleared Yahoo Hong Kong of wrongdoing in the separate, but similar, case of imprisoned journalist Shi. The commission reported that Yahoo China turned over information to Chinese authorities, but the Yahoo Hong Kong subsidiary was not involved. "Yahoo Hong Kong did not exercise control over the affairs of Yahoo China," the report says. "Such control was in fact exercised wholly by Yahoo Inc."

In a 2005 merger deal , Yahoo transferred its China properties to Alibaba, China's largest e-commerce company and acquired a 40 percent interest in the merged operation. Critics charged that the merger was partially intended to shield Yahoo from responsibility for its actions in China. In any case, the merger is likely to make it harder for Yu to prevail in a lawsuit against the American company - a prospect experts say is already complicated by the international flavor of the case.

"The normal rule is that when you're doing business in a foreign country, you're obligated to comply with the law," says Allen Weiner, associate professor of international law at Stanford University. "We may not like the law. But Yahoo is in a difficult position.

"She's presumably going to have to establish that this was a human rights violation," says Weiner. "Whether arbitrary arrest would count is something that the courts haven't really decided.... The next thing to figure out is whether Yahoo aided and abetted it.... The bottom line is that it's pretty hard to prevail in these cases."

If Yu's legal prospects are dim, her husband's are nonexistent. In 2003, Wang appealed his case to the Beijing Higher People's Court. He lost. According to the court's written ruling, Wang had edited, published and contributed articles to 42 issues of two political e-journals, advocating for open elections, a multi-party system and separation of powers in the government. In his e-journals, Wang called socialism a "totalitarian and despotic political system," and wrote that the Chinese government was "outwardly democratic but inwardly despotic."

Confronted with a rap sheet like that, the court ordered Wang to serve out his sentence.

Yu says she's not giving up. "I think Yahoo should follow the world human rights standards," she says. She wants Yahoo to pay damages and, less realistically, she hopes U.S. legal action might somehow result in her husband's freedom. "I want my husband released from prison.... Money cannot pay back my husband's freedom, his life."

Yu last saw her husband March 5, the day before she flew to California, then Chicago, now Virginia. She spoke with him through a glass window. She says he is coping well, even though the guards rarely let him go outside. Wang lives in a crowded cell with nine other men. He sleeps on bunk beds and does push-ups to stay in shape. Prison food consists of tasteless vegetables. Yu brings him books to read. She once called the prison and begged that her husband be allowed to visit his dying mother in the hospital. Wang's captors said no.

But her husband has kept busy behind bars. He's still writing, Yu says. Still writing the same things that he wrote before he went to prison, when his phone was tapped and strange men would follow him and Yu on the streets. He doesn't plan to stop, even when he gets out of prison. He doesn't care if the government calls it subversion. He calls it freedom.

"He's a stubborn guy," Yu says. Then she smiles.

'Yahoo betrayed my husband'

[Al-khiyal]

March 22 2007 -- The authorities ordered the closure of the Web TV site www.ccztv.com on 19 March for broadcasting a news programme that had not been authorised by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT).

“The growth of the Chinese Internet at a dizzying rate has not been accompanying by any relaxation in censorship,” Reporters Without Borders said. “It is deplorable that websites still cannot post their own news reports.”

Last December, the authorities blacklisted eight Web TV companies that were accused of producing their own “illegal” reports and broadcasting them on the Internet. The companies have since closed or have changed their names and content.

China: Web TV site closed over unauthorised news programme