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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.
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...
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.