China's Response To the Internet Addiction Death 250
eldavojohn writes "Last week, news broke of a tragic incident that resulted in the death of a 16-year-old boy at one of China's internet addiction camps. Details were scarce except for reports that the camp remained open. New reports are now coming in from China Daily that report 13 arrested and the camp closed down on Friday with 122 participants being sent home. The vice-chief of the district has stated that the authorities are working on the case to identify and punish the criminals involved in the death. Xinhua is reporting that the camp was unlicensed. This is directly in conflict with what the Southern Metropolis Daily reporter is saying, 'When the reporter arrived outside the rear wall of the school, children on the third and fourth floors started to stick notes into aluminum cans, drink bottles, and slippers, and others folded notes into paper planes. They tried to throw them over the wall, but owing to the distance, none of them succeeded. Some children had papers bearing the messages "SOS" and "beating" which they waved out the windows. Some wrote calls for help on their clothing, which they displayed to the reporter. Some even yelled for help. They were all stopped by the instructors.' Here is that original story in Chinese. Is China handling this delicate issue appropriately or are the news reports of justice and monitoring treatments merely a facade?"
Re:Of course not... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry but I would have to respectfully disagree. Like many things in life, China is not all bad, and the US is not all good. I have lived in China for 2 years, and I tell you for working with the Chinese government that the Chinese government generally does want to do the right thing and often does try its best. Does it fail at times, yes. Is is subject to problems with bribery, yes. Does it occasionally do some really, really bad things, yes.
The western media will ignore 10,000 good things that happen in China and focus on the one bad thing. I know, this is how news works. The same is true in the US. However, if all you knew about the US was what you read in the news, you would think people in the US all carry guns and live in fear of being shot. That does not make up for Chinese government's bad behavior, but I do get tired of these westerns who think China is purely evil. It isn't. Life here in China is actually pretty good. I go about my business, and no one bothers me. All my employees go about their lives and never have any trouble with government. They know everything the government does because the government has almost no control over news and the internet ( Everyone uses proxies to read the foreign news in Chinese. Foreign news in English is almost never blocked - including slashdot and articles highly critical of China. ) Please stop acting like the Chinese government is the same as it was under Mao. It isn't.
Re:China - one child not true? (Score:3, Interesting)
Couples who were single children themselves, for instance, are allowed a second child.
Interesting responses (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting to read that the majority of responses here seem to be in sympathy of china because it apparently happened here. Makes me wonder how many slashdot readers are dupes for some chinese propaganda machine... I know that sounds paranoid, but the fact that these stories about china continue to surface, and the "anonymous" internet response is a collective yawn... The fact remains that one cannot know anything of any country that engages in such invasive propaganda management. It may all be true, but I don't believe it. I can't. Not until the chinese people get a chance to express for themselves their condition, no matter how unflattering it may be to "One China".
So please, continue to reply to this message with 'But you do this in your country' or 'your press is just as bad' or 'you're just a stooge of western media'...
Re:Of course not... (Score:3, Interesting)
This seems to be a camp that charges parents for admission for their kids, (without connection to the state?). The first thing I thought when I saw 'Chinese Internet Addiction Camp' was that the kid must have said something online to piss off the authorities and they shut him up 'for his own good' in an 'Internet Addiction Camp' ( read political re-education camp ).
Especially as Internet Addiction / pathalogical internet use / pornography etc seems to be being played up Chinese media of late, I suspect the government of shenanigans until proven otherwise given the character of the Chinese government.
Maybe the Chinese government has learned to be more subtle in it's control of late, realising that shutting people up for speaking out against the government makes them look bad? Here are some possiblities that the burden of proof is on the Chinese government to disprove.
The Chinese government probably outlaws porn and manipulates public opinion to create a class of generally dispised internet perverts it can persecute. The general opinion is that when someone is locked up for looking at porn it is something they did to themselves and which they deserve.
In fact whenever someone gets locked up for doing something on the internet, the public likely assumes they were locked up for looking at porn. It may even be that in many cases they WERE looking at porn because the government might not prosecute porn looking unless there is something else that pisses them off. Many people may have an incriminating hard drive full of porn thinking that they've gotten away with it and somehow gamed the system. They are now at the mercy of the state.
Even if the person has no porn whatsoever, the fact tha most people locked up for internet crimes are being locked up for porn means that they will be assumed to have been looking at porn when they are locked up. China doesn't appear to be limiting political dissention, but only porn. Sure limiting porn is a restriction of rights, and probably a wrong thing to do, but it's a minor thing, nobody thinks much less of the Chinese government for doing so, especially since the policy is probably popular within China.
With these youths, maybe they have pissed off the authorities, and their parents have been given the choice to send their children to 'Internet Addiction Camps' paying for it out of their own pockets or their children will be prosecuted for some more serious trouble their youthfully brash fingers have typed online.
The public sees some fat stupid teens wasting their life playing games who are saved by sending them to 'Rehab' when in fact they are being subjected to Orwellian 're-education' without the bad publicity for China that less subtle means would entail.
Given the character of the Chinese government the burden of proof is on them to prove otherwise.
Re:Wait and see (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wait and see (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wait and see (Score:3, Interesting)
True, but in reality the distinctions of guilt or innocence mean little outside of the legal framework. We have established a method of determining guilt in a fair and balanced system, and when that system fails to prove guilt then essentially "factual guilt" is left between the accused and God, the FSM, or their conscience - or anyone who they chose to confide a confession to. Since no one here on Slashdot is likely to meet any of those descriptions, then any discussion of "factual guilt" is useless, as factual guilt cannot be proven (and the result of a trial has already shown this), so we just fall back to the only form of guilt that means anything - legal.
Evil Empire (Score:3, Interesting)
Is China handling this delicate issue appropriately or are the news reports of justice and monitoring treatments merely a facade?"
China is the most worthy heir to the title of Evil Empire (after North Korea at least). Like all communist regimes, it is a despotic tyranny that tramples the rights of its victims, the citizens. So no, China is not handling this appropriately. The governement there cannot implement a solution when it is the source of the problem.
Re:Of course not... (Score:3, Interesting)
Umm.. no...
Westerners who have grown up in a free society think they are innoculated against ever falling for state propaganda. They see examples of propaganda posters / propaganda films from ages past and think: yeah, maybe if I grew up looking at that shit every day I might believe it, but that stuff would never fool someone who's seen enough truth to know what it tastes like. I think this is wrong. The propaganda you've seen is like the commercials of the 1950s. EXTREMELY PRIMITIVE compared to the stuff they have today. I'm not surprised at all Westerners in China find it reasonable - for one thing if it weren't MOSTLY reasonable the trains wouldn't run on time, and they basically do in China.
I think you could say that everyone is happy 99% of the time anywhere where the trains run on time. But without the voices of ordinary people represented I have grave concerns as to where the remaining interests/forces will take china. With those ordinary people who could say HEY WAIT A MINUTE, THIS IS STUPID, silenced, the chinese corporate and state interests, already more entwined than they are in most of the western world where this is also a problem go unchecked.
Intresting story about that... (Score:3, Interesting)
So this topic has of course brought up the "well the US ain't perfect either!" argument. And no, we are not. However I'd like to think that we do try and have in place the tools to make our trying actually mean something. (Our constitution/Bill of Rights/etc.)
That being said this morn one of our local radio talk shows stumbled upon a serious subject, kiddy porn, via the "My cat downloaded that kiddy pron" excuse story. They then even went deeper and talked about how given how harshly kiddy porn is dealt with here how that can be, and is, used as a weapon vs people. (IE put kiddy pron on your targets computer and then turn them in.)
They actually did a relatively decent job talking about the issue given the show and then an actual IT guy called in and spoke about it. He dispelled a lot of their jovilaity by underlying how serious the issue is as well as, getting to how this relates to China now, telling this story:
Some Chinese national was working here in Fla and left his laptop in some computer lab at some point. The person in question was a journalist working to show the various human rights violations that the Chinese government perpetrates. And so in response to this the Chinese government had an operative call the FBI and tip them off that there was kiddy porn on the guys laptop. The operative then went to the lab and planted the kiddy porn onto the laptop.
I'm sure you can see the mistake, he did it backwards. In court it was proven that the porn was put on the laptop after the tip. But you can imagine the hell that the Chinese national went though even while trying to prove his innocence. (The IT guy said that the attitude surrounding kiddy pron is guilty until proven innocent pretty much right now.)
We may have our issues here in the US, as do the other 1st world free nations, but China still needs to go a long way before they can even close to being viewed as a nation that is not known, and rightly so, for abusing it's own people.
Re:Of course not... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm suspicious of China precisely BECAUSE it looks like the way the US would handle it. And I am informed about the state of justice within the US system.
If you think highly of the US system, it's because you haven't been watching it. There are worse systems, but the US system is definitely not a good one, and it seems to be deteriorating. The criminal system seems to let anyone associated with law enforcement get away with murder. Even if convicted of the act the result is almost never worse than getting fired, and it doesn't usually seem to even get investigated, even when there's plenty of evidence. And as for the civil court system...let's consider the case of SCO vs. IBM. Six years, IBM has probably spent millions of dollars in defense and court filings, and SCO isn't going to pay them one red cent in damages, because they've gone bankrupt. And it hasn't produced ANY evidence worthy of the name to back up their charges. No even under a direct court order. That case should have been over within 3 months when SCO twice refused to produce evidence under a court order. (They gave excuses rather than denials, but they didn't produce it.) If IBM were the one suing, this might be excusable, but the court was ordering SCO to produce evidence showing that it had any reason for it's charges against IBM. When that wasn't forthcoming, the case should have been dropped by the court (though not IBM's counter charges. "Tortuous interference with business practices" seems an apt description of SCO. (That the case was apparently funded, at least in part, by MS, but that that hasn't been able to be investigated, is just an added bit of information as to how unjust the court system is.)
I'm told that the system isn't getting worse, it's just that I hadn't noticed before how unjust it was. This could be true, but it's definitely no guiding light by which all should be guided.