[Nettime-bold] cybercafes throughout china shut down

["geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

http://sunspot.net/technology/bal-te.chinese30jun30.story?coll=bal%2Dtechnol
ogy%2Dheadlines
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia-pacific/newsid_2073000/2073388.s
tm

"China says it is planning to close about 150,000 unlicensed internet cafes
nationwide."

"200,000 internet cafes - only 46,000 legally registered. China now home to
world's second largest community of web users. The state has its own secret
internet police nicknamed 'the great fire-wall of China'."

"On June 16, 2002, after a fire killed 24 people in the unlicensed Lanjisu
Cyber Cafe in Beijing, all Internet cafes in Beijing were closed.
Authorities cited the lack of fire safety equipment in many cafes. Most of
the victims were students who were taking advantage of inexpensive
late-night Net access rates. Two teens were arrested for allegedly setting
the fire two weeks after having a dispute with an attendant at the
cybercafe. Beijing Mayor Liu Qi said that illegal Internet cafes will be
punished and legal Internet cafes that fail to meet important regulations
will have their licenses revoked. According to the official
People's Daily, 2,200 of the 2,400 Beijing-based cybercafes have been
operating illegally. Officials in other Chinese cities, including Hong Kong,
said they would also tighten control over Internet cafes."

http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,4591861%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,
00.html

Showdown at the cyber cafe
Catherine Armitage
JUNE 28, 2002

'Is there anybody who wants to have sex just for one night with me?"
This plea and countless others like it posted regularly in Chinese chat
rooms may be the best explanation of why the authorities have summarily
closed internet cafes across China.

The authorities blame fire safety. But if someone sets fire to a
hospital, do you close down all hospitals? That question has been asked many
times since a fire ripped through the Lanjisu internet cafe in Beijing's
university district of Haidian, taking 24 young lives almost two weeks ago.
Two boys aged 13 and 14 admitted on television that they had used
petrol to torch the cafe in revenge for being barred by the cafe's staff.
But by then Beijing mayor Liu Qi had closed all of Beijing's estimated 2400
cyber cafes, vowing no new licences would be issued. The operators of
illegal cafes - estimated at 90 per cent of the total - would be severely
punished. Large Chinese cities including Shanghai, Guangzhou and Tianjin
quickly followed suit.

There's no doubt most of the illegal cyber cafes were a fire hazard.
They proliferated in basements and abandoned buildings where anyone with
some empty space, a few personal computers and a nose for what's hot among
youth could set up a no-frills business and be assured of a ready clientele.
Most cafes were grimy and smoky, and it was common practice to lock the
doors to ward off police inspections. According to one report, the Lanjisu's
owner usually locked his customers in for the night and took the keys home,
as he did on June 15.

Equally, there is no doubt that how to control the internet in the
interest of "patriotism, law abiding, truth and civility" has been a
high-level preoccupation of the Chinese Communist Party as the number of
users on the mainland has doubled every six months for the past several
years. Various tacks have been tried, from onerous restrictions on users and
service providers to eavesdropping and censorship.

But this time the prime motivation for the crackdown may not be
political. In the blaze of public anger sparked by the fire, the focus
quickly switched from fire danger to the perceived moral dangers posed by
the cafes. Beijing's vice-mayor told reporters internet cafes were like
opium for youth. Even before the fire the press carried regular stories
about parents' concerns that their children were skipping school and
ignoring homework to hang out in the cafes, where they might be surfing
pornographic sites.

Since the fire, it has been reported that a Hubei man was so concerned
about his son's internet cafe habit that he took a year's leave from his
factory so he could meet his boy at the school gate and escort him home.

That may not be the sacrifice it seems, given that many people working
in cash-strapped state-owned enterprises have not received their wages in a
year or more. But the cases and the fact they are reported in national
newspapers underscore the high level of heat surrounding the issue in this
highly competitive society where, in the run-up to university entrance exams
in July, the papers are also peppered with stories of candidates committing
suicide for fear they will not make the grade. Since the fire, many people
have reportedly phoned China's emergency help line (the equivalent of 000)
to dob in cyber cafes defying the ban.

"When a tragic event like this happens, the Government, especially the
local Government, has to take some action to show its determination to make
progress," says Zhang Xiaogang, vice-president of Sparkice Internet Cafe,
China's first licensed and most famous cyber cafe. But he disputes the
assertion by "some Western journalists" that the latest crackdown is another
attempt by the Government to control access to the internet. He points out
that the vast majority of China's estimated 33 million web surfers use home
PCs, not cyber cafes, to access the web. So closing down the cafes to curb
web access would be like using a feather to crack a walnut.

Tara Tranguch, information director of Beijing-based IT consultancy
MFC Insight, says that this year the Chinese Government has been shifting
the primary responsibility for overseeing internet cafes from the
telecommunications ministry to the ministry of culture. "They are starting
to look at them not as an [internet] access issue but as a place where
people hang out," she says. "Does China really encourage a place where youth
are going to hang out at 2.30 in the morning? I don't think so."

Stories in the local press about the harsh lives of the alleged
arsonists have cemented the issue in the public mind as a moral, not a
political, one. They also tap a deep vein of widespread unease about the
social costs of reform and the opening up of Chinese society.

It was widely remarked that the 14-year-old named Song who confessed
on TV had spiked blond hair with a black Z dyed into the back of his head.
The China Youth Daily reported that his parents divorced before he was a
year old and he lived with his father. But since his father was jailed for
drug use in 1997, he has been virtually unsupervised, and his father has had
many girlfriends, two of whom beat him. His accomplice, the 13-year-old
named Zhang, had a similar story: both his parents were drug users, the
paper reported.

A survey of internet use done in 2000 by the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences suggests parents' fears may be unfounded. The survey interviewed
5000 people, aged 10 to 18, dividing them into two groups according to
whether they used the internet. It found no significant differences between
users and non-users on measures such as how well they performed at school,
how much homework they did and how much they slept.

Says associate professor Guo Liang, one of the authors of the survey:
"I don't think internet [availability] really makes young students spend too
much time on the internet. Some students may spend too much time
but, on average, it is not so bad."

Chinese parents pay too much attention to their children's school
scores, Guo believes. No wonder the children of the one-child policy can't
wait to get online - they not only discover worlds of previously
inaccessible information, they can develop cyber identities independent of
their overzealous parents. For university students, internet cafes also
provide a place to escape from the tedium of dormitory life.

Officially, the Chinese Government supports the growth of the internet
because of the opportunities it offers for China's economic development. But
there is heated debate within the party between those who believe the
internet must be tightly controlled in the interests of China's stability
and those who favour a more laissez-faire approach.

But given problems with China's delivery and credit systems, the
political and cultural effect of the net in China, as in the West, will be
much greater than its commercial effect for many years to come. In the
meantime the Communist Party urges people to "make great efforts to advocate
 online ethics and ... educate and guide teenagers to resist consciously the
corrosive influence of online harmful content", as a party official exhorted
at the launch of a "special campaign to rid harmful information on the
internet" in May.

If the issue is truly juvenile delinquency rather than politics, it
would help, as The Asian Wall Street Journal editorialised last week, if
neighbourhood associations or community groups could provide youngsters with
alternative healthy activities. But that kind of civil society is lacking in
China because the Communist Party fears non-party organisations could
eventually undermine its power.

(Catherine Armitage is The Australian's China correspondent.)





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