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."

Comments

Excuses

[juliao]

The Chinese government has always had a problem with internet cafes. Especially because they are anonymous, surfing from a cafe is quite different from surfing from your own home. If you surf from home, you can be held liable for what you download and what you access. At a cafe, you can never be sure about who does what. And that, of course, drives any control-freak internal intelligence agency quite mad.

Of course they could have shut down most of the cafes before, since they were illegal, but that would expose them to international pressure and make them look like tyrants deemed to deny freedom and anonymity.

Now, they have the perfect excuse. Under the banner of "think of the fires", they can close down most of the cafes and start imposing strict regulations and control on the remaining ones. If any of the remaining ones fails to comply, they can always audit them for fire regulations compliance, and subsequently shut them down.

And what will the international community say? Nothing. What can you say?

Any kind of totalitary regime comes with its own risks. Abuse of power comes to mind as a prominent one. The Chinese government will always leverage their existing power in order to maitain and obtain more power. Frankly, I don't know how a one-billion-people country can be ruled. I don't even know if a democratic regime as we know it would ever work there. But I'm sure that it can't be much worse than it already is.