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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
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?
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
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.