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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."
Someone needs to start a "shut down by China" list so the rest of us can find the good stuff.
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!
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).
I remember Chinese government promotes Linux
m l?tid=102&tid=126&tid=163&tid=187
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/11/18/0219249.sht
Wouldn't the exact same thing happen in other countries (including the U.S.) if businesses were making adult-only games available to children?
But it seems that this is what happens when a country is allowed any sort of say in what constitutes "acceptable" use of anything. It's more or less well known that China's been firewalling off various chunks of the internet for years [ can't let those subversive ideas in, y'know, the citizenry might get a notion to revolt ] and this would just be more of the same.
Keep in mind, however, there are some parts of the United States that have a similar mindset. I mind me of the Maine library association....there were grants given out to give them internet access, but with a catch, that they had to have filtering software installed. Of course, many people cried "censorship!" and let slip the dogs of protest, but in the end, the puritans fought harder to keep all the corrupting influences from our youth, etc, etc.
Forgive my rambling...I'm not caffeinated yet. ^^;
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
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?
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.
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?
Yes.
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.
Can I shout that at the statue of liberty? Or has that been closed for another three years out of fear of terrurrrrr?
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
Exactly Karl Rove is using his dark mage powers to infuse Bush with the souls of Stalin and Mao.
That's not really a fair comparison. Change Statue of Liberty to White House maybe. That's a bit closer. Of course, if you start raving like that in front of the White House you'll be whisked away by some unfriendly guys with sunglasses...especially if your skin is brown.
Anyone in the DC area want to try it and report back?
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
Well, it's merely an amusing anecdote not meant to demonstrate anything much one way or the other, but this is true.
A year before the protest and massacre in Tien An Men, I visited Beijing as a backpack tourist and went to Tien An Men square where I proceeded, along with some British accomplices, to do hand stands and various low end acrobatics in an attempt to attract attention.
Well, it worked great. In seconds we had a huge crowd. It wasn't really that we were so impressive, but more that people wanted to see what everybody else was gawking at and the crowd itself was what was drawing the crowd.
So, the higher up cops --there's actually many, many different levels of cops in Mainland China with only some actually having any authority-- came in and pulled the crowd apart and told us we were being bad and not to do it again.
That's it. That's all that happened. We were clearly trouble makers, but we weren't arrested or even hassled.
So, yeah what happened in that same sqauare a year later was a terrible tragedy, but Mainland China might not be as scarry as you think.
On the other hand, I've been called names by cops in the US over the loudspeaker of their partol cars and when I get pulled over, I regularly have my car searched from top to bottom looking for drugs when the stop was allegedly for things like a bent license plate or some such nonsense.
Amen to that! Try to read this interesting article at the 2600.
Of course, Tianamen Square could never happen in the US, now could it?
Kent State University - May 4 1970. National Guard opens fire on Students protesting the Vietnam War. 4 Dead, 9 Injured.
Jackson State University - May 15 1970. Police open fire on a protesting crowd. 2 Dead, 12 Injured.
Just because the number of dead is smaller, do not dismiss this. When threatened, Governments will fight back.
How do you say Patriot Act in Chinese?
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
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.
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.
In the USA long after the Patriot Act was enacted, huge numbers of demonstrators packed the streets to protest the Iraq War. The American government, reflecting the will of the American people, defended their civil right to protest.
By contrast, if huge numbers of demonstrators packed the streets of Beijing to protest the rape and slaughter of Tibetan nuns, then the Chinese police and the regular Chinese people would kill the demonstrators.
One additional point is worth noting. After a speech by a scholar from the Rand Institute, I went up to the scholar to give him a word of advice: "Never base your analyses about Korea, China, etc. on interviews with Chinese, Koreans, etc. They never admit the negative elements of their societies."
He agreed with me.
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.
There is a reaction that quickly happens every time Slashdot has an article on China's suppression of free speech and association. Apologists for China always trot out past transgressions committed by the USA government. How is that relevant? Does a bad act comitted by the USA give China a 'free' bad act? Aren't Tianenman Square and Kent State both wrong on fundamental moral principle? Why would anyone use one to excuse the other?
I think most people are uncomfortable making moral judgements these days. I'm not. I judge this action by China to be wrong. This is true whether you hate George Bush or not.
Can someone without a pro-usa axe to grind please mod this up.
Anarchists never rule
Don't you get it, this is exactly the reason why countries around the world dislike the United States.
Democracy is good, but its not for everyone.
If you're forcing democracy down its throat, you're only gonna end up harming yourself. Just like how the Bush Administration is trying to push democracy in the Middle-East.
The people are not ready yet!
Other forms of government can be just as effective. So they are different, well thats culture for you!
And China' ain't bad, they are opening up, I've been in China for over a month and it feels just like home, you get to eat, sleep, shop, work, freedom to choose your jobs, buy materialistic things. What more?
China has been living with far worst government for over 2-5k years now (read: Monarchy; Emporers) and if you take a step back, Communism is actually much less strict.
Let the country run itself.
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?
I've heard that argument before. People choose to match the profile, so it's their fault. Words only spoken by someone that's never matched the profile.
I'm white, very wasp, and I grew up in a medium well-to-do household. I'm not a preppie, but I look like my background, and pretty much always have. I don't get bothered by the police unless I'm speeding. Even then, they are polite and reasonable when dealing with me (and I to them).
In college I got to be good friends with a black guy (large muscular build to make it worse). Whenever he was in the car I'd get pulled over and hassled a LOT over BS reasons, frequently, police would unsnap their holsters and keep their hands on their guns the whole time they spoke to us. The conversations would be fridgedly polite and unreasonable, at best.
I've been pulled over twice inside of 15 minutes while driving from one side of Dallas to the other. Both times we were both pulled out of the car and questioned seperatly, mostly about drugs. It's was frequent enough that it was a sort of punishment, even though no charges are ever brought, and I certainly never went to court.
The difference between being inside the profile and outside is dramatic. But the kinds of choices that put you inside or outside of the profile (having a black friend, for example) aren't the kinds of choices we should have to make to avoid running problems with the law. If your born the wrong color, and don't have the money for nice clothes (or people don't like your taste in clothes), you're just screwed.
Now, I will follow up. My friend and I haven't been pulled over in nearly 10 years. I don't know if times have changed, if it's because we're older, or what. Probably a little of all of the above.
plus-good, double-plus-good
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.
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.
[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.
Anyway, if you're 16 you can do whatever you want in a netbar. Watch porn. Play CS. Whatever.
:-)
In that respect, yes, China is less totalitarian than the U.S., as they allow things like porn at a lower age than we do...
But how about free-speech restrictions (can you talk about Tianenman there?)? Forced prison-labor camps? Childbirth restrictions (1 child per woman, last I checked)? These are not the policies of a non-totalitarian society.
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.
Depends on how you define "totalitarian." I would argue that yes, these are traits of totalitarianism -- it's the responsibility of parents to ensure that their children are not doing the things they ought not do.
I think there can be room for cultural differences in how certain things which are both socially and physically affectatious are treated though (e.g. drinking alcohol often leads to accidents with previously-uninvolved people, so we restrict that from children, but political speech on the Internet hurts nobody, no matter how repulsive, because it still requires actions on the part of an individual somewhere to turn those words into harm).
The U.S. is far from free of totalitarian influence, even on such things we tend to hold dear as free-speech, but relative to other nations, the U.S. is still less-totalitarian than most (though Bush has been working overtime to change 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.
Exactly; I think there can be room for cultural differences in the treatment of some issues. Sex is the classic U.S. vs. Europe example...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
First... people don't typically go to net bars to 'spread anti-governmental messages.' I don't know how hard the government would work to track you if you did, provided you weren't trying to organize some kind of protest. Criticism on the local level is just fine. You don't want to threaten the boys in Beijing, of course, but Beijing is a long ways away from most things and not really a very present force in the average persons life. It's a felony, for that matter, to threaten the US president, even as a joke. (yes, I know we can vote him out of office.)
I haven't heard the $500 for a porn site quote, but that seems like an awful lot. They could get away with offering $50 and it would be half many people's wages. The Teachers I worked with made $125/month plus free housing, and still managed to dress decently. It doesn't sound accurate. There was very easy access to all kinds of porn when I went there.
Second... There still is some fascist element to China. Rights of the state above the individual, and all. You don't want to pose a credible threat to the boys in Beijing. But things aren't as bad as most folks outside seem to imagine, and the government just isn't as organized as most outsiders tend to portray. People are a little edgy about talking politics, despite the relative calm considering Mao's "let so and so many flowers bloom" statement back during the CR, etc. But they do.
The government controls things like the mass media, but more through censorship than outright violence. I was on TV once while there, and it was interesting to hear things spelled out very explicitly. Don't criticize the government. Don't suggest that China has any racial problems. Don't talk about sex or use profanity. It will be edited out... can't remember if there was anything else...
Just don't trust ANY statistics that come out of China. There's no attempt made at either honesty or accuracy.
And when it comes down to it, rule of law is a little shaky for Chinese citizens. What you can get away with depends on your money and your connections. If you know the right party members, you can literally get away with murder.
I was told stories about well connected folks who did. It's an open secret apparently.
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.