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China Closes 1,600 "Internet Bars"
Kujila writes "According to a Chinese Reuters article, China has closed close to 1,600 "Internet Bars" (probably the equivalent of 'Internet Cafes' stateside) and inflicted up to $12.1 million worth of fines upon the establishment owners. The Internet Bars were apparently letting young children pay to play violent and adult-only PC games. China inspected a grand-total of 1.8 million bars, and ordered about 18,000 of those bars to "to stop operation for rectification," It's estimated that 18% of China's Internet population is composed of minors."
That is .009% of all the bars checked. Maybe they were selling booze or crack also. Who knows. I'm sure .009% of any 1.8 million sites anywhere may need 'rectification'. This is much ado about nothing, unless we are concerned about the civil rights of minors in China not being able to play some video games. This is in China, where there are many more serious human right problems than this.
Again....so what!
18000/1800000 = .01 .01 * 100 = 1%
Isn't that right? I'd say 1% is a lot more significant. More than a few outliers. Less of a "struck by lightning" or "winning the lottery" type proportion.
I doubt it was "typical", but when I was in Xian this summer I saw a rent-a-terminal type internet place (there was no bar or food being sold, although there was a KFC next door) on the bottom floor of a large computer market. There were dozens of machines, about half of them were in use, and most of them were playing either Counterstrike or Diablo, and a few were plying Warcraft 3.
With the dictators in Beijing bent on preventing access to independent (western) news, having smut as a pretext to close down internet cafes is pretty welcome. Probably the crime was actually to let customers read the New York Times. In China communists eyes, that is high treason. After all, they have their Great Firewall to prevent access to porn, haven't they?
It's not about communism; China really isn't communist anymore. They're extremely capitalistic, and also extremely authoritarian, with an unhealthy dose of nationalism thrown in.
Yeah, that is what we call "internet bar" in China. It's ture that most PCs there are used for playing games, CS and some korean diablo-like games. I can always see children play games there although it is unlawful...
While 1'600 sounds like a pretty huge number, the closing and the fines itself doesn't sound so much special if it is really true that they let children play adult games. After all in germany similar things[1] have happened and I am sure that if young children would use internet cafe to watch porn the US authorities wouldn't be much pleased either.
[1] http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/33234
A typical internet bar is a loud video arcade where a lot of teenagers are playing MMORG's and downloading mp3's. When you log into one of those machines, you get this huge menu of all of the games that you can play, and they are really cheap , (about 10 cents/hour).
There is no way one could operate in the United States. Almost all of the software used in the internet bars is pirated, and anyone in the US who tried to set an internet bar up in the United States would get instantly shut down for copyright
violations. The Chinese government frankly does not care at all about this.
Curiously, my impression is that the internet bars
help the government stay in power. In areas where
there is high unemployment, a lot of unemployed people will
spend huge amounts of time in those bars playing
video games. I suspect that this gets out a lot of frustration and boredom that might otherwise be directed at the government.
Amen to that! Try to read this interesting article at the 2600.
1,350,000,000 Chinese. (Give or take.)
...Porn, gambling, violence and similar problems..."
18,000,000 bars checked. (One for every 75 people.) That's not bad. That would be the equivalent of 3.9 million bars in the U.S.*
18,000 bars need "rectification." That probably means they were fined and told to do X, Y, and Z. Only 1% of bars needed to be rectified. These bars remained open.
1,600 bars were completely shut down. That means out of all the bars, 0.0089% were shut down. One out of every 1,000 were fined/rectified. 1 out of every 11,250 were shut down. Why were they fined or shut down?
"...allowing children to play violent or adult-only games and other violations...
So, the issue here is, not censorship, but that the Chinese Government regulates internet bars, and that some bars allowed children to do everything from play violent video games (admittedly not that big on an issue) to see explicit sex videos (not sure any parent would want their 7-yr old doing that).
Yes the parents should've checked the bars, but hey, so did the government. And now because of one parent's lousy parenting (not checking to see what their kid did), the government stepped in. And did this on very rare occasions.
Frankly, I don't see what the fuss is about.
BONUS NEWS@: The Internet Society of China recently released a blacklist of 112 internet protocol (IP) addresses of spam servers.
* Metric Conversion: 4.5 Libraries of Congress / Volkswagen.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
In case you haven't noticed yet, Slashdot doesn't accept chinese characters. Stupid slashdot.
s.clementmonkey@sympatico.ca, remove the 'monkey'.
Let me preface this by saying that I'm an American living in China now, and have been for the three of the last four years.
Internet cafes are rarely about reading anything. In all my visits to internet 'bars', I've only seen a handful of people reading articles, or news websites. They're all there to chat, play online games, or look at smut.
Closing 18,000 bars barely affects anyone. There's an internet bar on practically every block, so those that have been closed probably were doing something wrong. It's extremely unlikely that they were closed for letting people visit banned websites, however, for the simple reason that anything the government deems 'too sensitive' is blocked behind the Great Firewall.
I'm happy to see a fairly balanced view of the issue here on slashdot, however, given how anti-"Chinese oppression' people usually seem. Living here, it's given me a different view on 'censorship.' Porn is illegal here, and I'm really not quite sure how that's a bad thing. It's available on the internet for anyone who really wants it, and I think it's kind of nice being able to pass by magazine stands and browse without being confronted with a thousand different porn mags. Strangely, the Great Firewall blocks a lot of news and free web servers (BBC, Geocities), but rarely does it block porn.
Another thing that the average American doesn't understand is how much freedom the press here actually has. Yes, there is censorship. Yes, there are topics that the press can't touch with a ten-foot pole (Taiwan, in particular). But there's a lot of criticism of the government in the newspapers here. While I don't approve of censorship of political issues, there is a far wider range of issues that can be discussed and criticised in public forums than the average American hears about.
They are, however, more serious than you'd think about the two issues they mention in the article. The government isn't all that happy about pornography, or kids cutting class to play video games. So they've taken steps to cut down on those activities. Those steps don't square with American libertarian views of how the world should work, but they're not all bad. And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar - I doubt the closure of those internet bars was a pretext for anything.
tek.
This is my first post, so please gentle. I am Chinese-American who emigrated to the US at a very young age and has since then returned as a study abroad student. I have been in many a "wangba" [Chinese for internet cafe] and I want to put all of this non-sense in perspective: 1.)Dissidents don't usually frequent wangbas because doing something politically insensitive in a wangba doesn't just endanger yourself, it endangers the owners and potentially the other patrons. 2.)It's mostly kids at these wangbas, doing exactly what the government says it's cracking down on: downloading porn and playing CS [and they were scary good at the latter; I'm a fairly competent CS player, but in this tiny ass village in Southwest China without even a single paved road I got my ass handed back to me by these 13 year old kids] 3.)The Great Firewall is about as effective as the regular Great Wall was, which is to say, it's not terribly effective. I would have to say I've been to two dozen different wangbas all over China, and it's hit or miss whether or not I can access the so called prohibited sites. New York Times was okay in most places, ditto with CNN. All the Tibetan Independence sites [I tried out of curiosity] were much more frequently blocked, and Amnesty Int'l is similarily more difficult to access. This leads into my fourth point... 4.)There are 1.8 million [that's million] of these wangbas all over China. 1.8 million. The way the Chinese government is set up, with it's extremly heirarchical (sp?), top-down, Central to Regional to Provincial to Local structure, the only way the government can manage to keep track of all of those 1.8 million internet bars is through one of those ubiquitious government "anti-something" campaigns, and even then only for a very short period of time before the various levels of the heiarchy return back to their normal state of resistance/grudging cooperation with each other. Basically, not only was the number of 18K bars shut down ridiculously small, there's a good chance, now that the government anti-smut/anti-video game violence/anti whatever campaign is over, that a good deal of those bars shut down would open themselves up, with the implicit approval of the local authorities, without so much as an iota of "rectification" carried out. This is just the way the Chinese government works, in all it's magnificently inefficient glory. 5.)Contrary to the generally libertarian impulse here in the US, I would have to say that a vast majority of the Chinese people would expect the government to creat and enforce morality laws. Whether you agree with it or not, or if you think that that isn't the "natural" and correct way for a government to act, it's what the Chinese expect the government to do for them. They have a very different set of implicit expectations for what a government does and what it's responsible for, and especially what its role in society is. I haven't been closely following this latest anti-violence/anti-smut campaign very closely, but I would hazard a guess that the campaign was mostly either received with a lukewarm welcome or total indifference. If the government goes over the bounds and uses this campaign as an excuse to shut down some wangbas or other internet meeting places for allowing access to politically sensitive information, then a great majority of the population would see that as an acceptable trade-off for dealing with the preceived problem of underage access to porn and violent games. This is simply how the society and the culture are in China. I'm not saying if it's right or wrong, but I'm just saying that's reality, and in reality, [here comes the really overextended metaphor] a boiling hot sulphur spring might seem like perfect hell for you but I bet the thermophile organisms that thrive there can't imagine any other way to live.