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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."
i completelly agree with China's Government behavior. I support children and teenagers having contact and learning with the computer, but playing violent games is far from what the word learning really means.
This young kids should be learning to read source code and hack it, or how to use the internet to do interesting research. Playing this kind of game just alienate the kids making them dumbasses (all right, I know slashdot is also alienating and prejuciail to my health, but I can't avoid it).
Wouldn't the exact same thing happen in other countries (including the U.S.) if businesses were making adult-only games available to children?
china's population is approx. 1.3 billion.
1.8 million internet bars means approx. 1 internet bar per 721 population.
to put that in perspective, a city of 30,000 would have 41 internet bars...
i'd like to know what counts as an "internet bar" though. anyone know what a typical chinese "internet bar" is like?
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?
A huge nation with a corrupt, fascist, evil government run by one small party of old men who are all afraid of what would happen to them if they lost power.
Wait which one - China or the US?
'Video nasties' were an 80's panic; the idea was that horror videos would corrupt youth. Please get you witchhunts, panics, and scares in the right order!
Since the video nasty, penny dreadful, sinful rock'n'roll song, three-volume novel (blamed for leading young ladies astray in times past) and comic book scares have all been and gone with amazingly little impact on anything, I think it is reasonable to have a fairly relaxed response to the current computer games scare
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Evil... tsk, you christians and your moral absolutism....
:)
How typical. Well don't forget the future of the US economy is increasingly dependant on this 'corrupt, fascist, evil government' (look how many western companies now have a substantial portion of their manufacturing base in China), not to mention that this is also the country with most favoured nation trading status with the US.
It's certainly no oasis of freedom, but the good thing is that they can regulate stuff like this when it needs to be done without any interfering from dodgy lobby groups. Democracy is overrated anyway
Wait which one - China or the US?
Why don't you try shouting that statement out in Tianamen Square and then at the Statue of Liberty, and find out the difference?
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
You've got to be kidding me? I dought there are more than 100 full time internet cafes in the entire US. Not counting the 6 that are opening and closing in any particular state at any giving moment. I've only ever seen one stable one in the entire down town Minneapolis area, and that one only makes money because they have a bakery.
In China you would be jailed, probably killed. If you hate Bush so much you aren't able to understand how that's different from USA, well, you need some therapy.
(Btw: I'm brazilian, and I'm not pro-Bush)
We don't know why they shut them down. More likely because some of the users were finding their way around the government approved web sites.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
While all I see is all this cringing about how horrid and totalitarian this is, it is easy to see from the figures that this is less than point one percent of the bars they checked which was a staggering 1.8 million. Holy smokes. Even if they just sell a coke or two, there's some commerce going on there.
And what were these guys shut down for? For allowing children to play adult games in public. Oh, that would be fine in the US right? Bullshit.
Now I think it is totally hypocritcal for Americans to get on a soap box about such a miniscule figure when the US puts content filters on millions of PCs in schools and libraries that prevent birth control and alternative political information from reaching students. And the US shuts down net cafes with just as much gusto as the Chinese. The double stardard is attrocious.
But you have to wonder. I mean didn't we just see an article in which hundreds of Slashdot posters defended in public the use of the term "ricer". Clearly there are some real double standards about what is appropriate when it comes to anything Asian.
William Randolf Hearst would be proud of all you asian haters making fools of yourselves in public. But remember, what you reap is what you sow.
Can someone without a pro-usa axe to grind please mod this up.
Anarchists never rule
Looking like a druggie (whatever 'druggie' may mean) is a form of protected speech too. Are you just trying to make your parent's point or what?
And what were these guys shut down for? For allowing children to play adult games in public. Oh, that would be fine in the US right? Bullshit.
Wrong. We have allowed children to play CounterStrike in Internet cafes for years.
And the US shuts down net cafes with just as much gusto as the Chinese. The double stardard is attrocious.
Oh? Prove it. I've *never* heard of an Internet cafe in the U.S. being shut down by the government because children were playing violent computer games. (they may have been shut down for other reasons, e.g. trafficking child porn, but violent computer gaming? Never heard of it.)
China is still a totalitarian socialist state, and this is more proof that socialism and totalitarianism go hand in hand.
Stop trying to justify a totalitarian nation's destruction of freedom by dodging the issue and bringing out the red-herring of what the U.S. does. This article talks about China, not the U.S..
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
> And China' ain't bad China puts people with different opinions in prison (disidents) as do most of the other communist countries (Cuba, North Korea, etc.) > Don't you get it, this is exactly the reason why countries around the world dislike the United States. I'm sure there are more reasons than exactly this *one*.
The common people mostly only care about what a president candidate look like.
I can't find which games, in particular, were banned. The original article is pretty poor.
/ 17/eng20020517 _95869.shtml
Here's a slightly longer perspective.
http://english.people.com.cn/200205
I was an English teacher in Nanjing from 1 year ago to about 6 months ago.
If you'd been to China recently, you'd know it isn't at all socialistic. Newspapers don't paint a very clear picture of things. It's somewhere between oligarchic, fascist and anarchic. But it's not socialistic at all. It used to be Maoist, distinct from Marxist Lenninist and also distinctly different from the socialistic governments of Europe. But China has changed a lot recently.
Anyway, if you're 16 you can do whatever you want in a netbar. Watch porn. Play CS. Whatever.
It's fair that the previous poster brought up the notion of standards. The US has to live by the same standards it applies to other nations. In China there's no age limit on alcohol or cigarette purchases. In the US, there is. Does this make the US a totalitarian state? I don't think it does. What has happened here is as 'totalitarian' as a rigid enforcement of the US movie rating system. And it's hard to tell from the article what the situation is on the ground. Sometimes, 'crackdowns' are ignored by business owners, who comply as superficially as possible. It's hard to tell how seriously people are taking this.
Of course, the US is more tolerant of violence than some cultures. Other non Judeo-Christian cultures are a lot more tolerant of sex.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
[quote]The regular Chinese will do just as much as the Beijing government to deny any wrongdoing by Beijing. Such is the nature of Chinese people.[/quote] You, sir, should be slapped with a wet fish. You just presumed to tell us all what the "nature" of 1.3 billion individual Chinese men and women is. Open your mind and you might see that the Chinese are people too, and that their feelings about their government are just as complex as our feelings about ours.
-sig removed for tax purposes-
I've been playing violent video games since I was ten. My father raised me to know the difference between reality and fantasy. I think my first FPS was Duke Nukem 3D. The government, any government, can't protect children from bad parenting forever. At some point, all governments must realize that these censorship programs for everything from erotica to swear words wouldn't be necessary, if they promoted programs to inform parents on successful methods for raising children. There is only so much the government can do the shield children from bad parenting.