Slashdot Mirror
Complete Net Cafe Shutdown After Beijing Fire
lunchlady doris writes: "The BBC has this story that tells of a fire in an internet cafe in Beijing that killed 24 people. The mayor responded to this tragedy by shutting down all 2,400 cafes in the city, most of which are operated illegally. Only 200 cafes will be allowed to reopen, pending municipal regulation. Needless to say, the netizens of Beijing are pissed and see this as a move to quash the limited access to the net that the Chinese people currently have."
As inhabitent of India I can say that noting is here new. China always very controlling the net and freedom of the speech.
Noting new, noting to wory about extra. I hoped the internet would change thing a bit, but thats dream so.
Radjif
I really don't see why 'the netizen would be upset'. A lot of the resident in big city, espeically like Beijing, have interenet access at home, even broad ban if you are lucky enough to stay in a modern building. The so-called internet cafe are really for teenagers to enjoy networked gameing (LAN), and sometimes to view pornographic content on the web, which is illegal anyway. It is ridiculous to judge that this is a way the goverment use to stop the 'netizen' to access the internet.
the real condition of these illegal net cafes.....
Think a large room with only one door(maybe two... second one likely locked) and 100-200 conmputers with a few hundred people. When they do things here they tend to do it big.
Windows are often barred as well so if there is a fire near an exit.... you can imagine the results.
This is why they are shutting down the cafes.... they are death traps.
As for controlling Internet access.... they want to limit the hours and the ages of the people who can access it - stop school children wasting their time there and it also means you have to be an adult to use it outside of school holidays.
I studied abroad in China for tge past year, and I was at one of the best universities in the country, supposedly, and guess how many exit doors were unlocked during class? 1 set of double doors.
this is during class at a university. The building easily had 500+ students in it.
No kidding. Last time I was there (98), I saw a guy working under a car with his body sticking out into the road, cars flying past.
No construction areas were blocked off -- pedestrians would just pick their way through cranes, pits, and piles of broken stone and concrete to get to the other side...
A cab we were in crashed into a bicycler in the street, and the policeman picked him up, dusted him off, and sent him on his way bleeding on his rickety bike.
On the way to ChangBaiShan we saw a number of overturned trucks along the side of the road, and finally flew off the road ourselves and flipped and crashed. This was after over an hour of imploring our insane driver to slow down.
When it comes to safety, the Chinese are still totally systematically insane.
However, if you care to read any news on it, you can see that the reason to shutdown netcafes is for safety and license inspection, it has nothing to do with squeezing free of speech and human right
i c/newsid_2056000/2056968.stm
So 2 days later, there is news of 93 killed in a Chinese mining disaster. Mining accidents in China have been quite prevalent. Why doesn't the government care as much about the miners?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia-pacif