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."

Comments

Good movement from China's Gov.

[gustgr]

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).

Re:Good movement from China's Gov.

[gustgr]

If this group of people could solve anything effectivelly we wouldn't need to worry about drug and alchool problems, just to mention a few. Children do not know what is good for them, and if the parents cannot handle them I believe the Gov. should take the responsabilities.

Re:Good movement from China's Gov.

[KublaiKhan]

The government should *not* take the responsibility. It never works.

A better idea would be parenting classes, offered freely, and perhaps mandatory for first tiem parents.
After all, before there was the nice government to take care of us, how the hell did kids get raised, anyway?

Re:Good movement from China's Gov.

[ctr2sprt]

Or they might have shut down the bars because people were using them to express pro-democracy viewpoints on blogs, bypass the Great Firewall, etc., and the whole "save the children" story is a complete fabrication.

Don't take anything China says at face value. This is not a free country we're talking about here. They release only that information which makes them look good to other countries, and if they haven't got any suitable information to release, they will make something up.

Re:Good movement from China's Gov.

[Anonymous Coward]

Children do not know what is good for them

Neither do most adults, as a matter of fact. Maybe we should pass laws saying adults can't play "violent video games". You guys wouldn't mind that, would you? Additionally, I see absolutely nothing wrong with children playing violent games. Violence is a part of the human psyche and, if expressed in a harmless way, can be very beneficial. In any case, the last thing I want for myself or my children is some prudish government telling us what we can and can't play on a computer.

This is news?

[Ann Elk]

Wouldn't the exact same thing happen in other countries (including the U.S.) if businesses were making adult-only games available to children?

1.8 million internet bars

[bani]

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?

Nice pretext...

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Nothing has changed

[jgaynor]

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?

That was the last witchhunt but one

[kahei]

'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 :)

Re:Nothing has changed

[sparlitup]

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 :)

Re:Nothing has changed

[Pave Low]

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?

Why don't you try shouting that statement out in Tianamen Square and then at the Statue of Liberty, and find out the difference?

That's less than point one percent 0.1 %

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Taught there.

[PsiPsiStar]

I can't find which games, in particular, were banned. The original article is pretty poor.

Here's a slightly longer perspective.
http://english.people.com.cn/200205/ 17/eng20020517 _95869.shtml

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.