From The Los Angeles Times:

Dens of the Cyber Addicts

A deadly fire prompts China’s latest crackdown on seedy i-cafes filled with game-obsessed players.
‘You can’t stop us,’ one youth says.

By CHING-CHING NI, TIMES
STAFF WRITER

BEIJING — At first, Song
Yozhu thought that his 14-year-old grandson was on drugs. The boy rarely
came home. When he did show up, he was lethargic. Then, a few weeks ago,
he and a 13-year-old friend bleached their hair blond and started living
together in an empty apartment.

    “He told
me, no, he was not on drugs,” Song said. “He had been hanging out at the
wang ba. He said he went there almost every night.”

    Wang
bas are China’s 200,000 Internet cafes, the vast majority of them illegal.
To the West, they may appear to raise the prospect of free expression in
a country with an authoritarian regime, but to Chinese parents, they are
smoke-filled rooms with substandard safety conditions, nothing more than
modern-day versions of opium dens ruining their children’s lives. And,
in some cases, taking their children’s lives.

    This
month, 25 people, many of them teenagers, were killed in a blaze at a Beijing
wang ba. Chillingly, it was no accident. Song’s grandson and his friend
have confessed to setting the fire, allegedly as revenge against the owners,
who had refused to let them in.

    The government
immediately shut down every wang ba in the capital, and Chinese parents
cheered. Large cities across China took similar action.

    “I am
very happy the government closed all the Internet cafes at the moment,”
said Lu Mei, who said his 16-year-old son was forced to repeat a year of
high school because he spent too much time at the cafes. “He used to lie
to me about where he was going. I thought he was studying at school, yet
he was playing games at the Internet cafe. I was so angry, I didn’t know
what to do. I couldn’t follow him everywhere.”

    Wang
ba translates as “Net bar.” But the majority of them qualify neither as
cafes nor bars. You won’t find espresso machines or beer on tap. You will,
however, see plenty of ashtrays and breathe in lots of smoke. Some facilities
are so primitive, the only bathroom is a bucket against a wall.

    Like
those at the wang ba that burned, most owners skirt the law, operating
without a license and serving minors. China permits people younger than
18 to patronize licensed wang bas on weekends and holidays. Those younger
than 14 can enter only with an adult.

    Some
say Beijing is responsible for promoting illicit wang bas. The Communist
government is so afraid of the Internet’s power to spread antisocial activities,
it has tried to control Internet cafes by making it nearly impossible to
get a license. Instead, the move has had the opposite effect.

    The illegal
market has flourished, with fewer safety precautions. Periodic crackdowns
such as the one underway have only made the cafes more popular.

    As much
as the government is wary of the Internet, it also understands the Web’s
economic and social benefits. For example, Beijing wants to be known as
a digital city for the 2008 Olympics. That won’t be possible if the authorities
unplug all the Internet cafes.

    The state-owned
telecommunications sector also has tremendous financial interest in promoting
the use of the Internet. The question Beijing is wrestling with is how
best to control the phenomenon without killing it.

    “It’s
hard to imagine they would want to crack down on a permanent basis,” said
Dali Yang, a China specialist at the University of Chicago. “No sane Chinese
leader would want to say that. This is not an absolute issue of Internet
freedom but how to best regulate the industry.”

    Even
if the government wanted a total ban, physically it wouldn’t be possible.
The wang bas pop up easily: All you need is a few computers and a room
and you’re in business.

    Still,
this month’s fire has become a rallying point for worried parents long
eager to stamp out the illegal cafes and rein in the country’s out-of-control
cyber kids.

    Blame
what is happening on two decades of dramatic social change. China went
from being a nearly computer-illiterate nation a few years ago to one with
33 million Internet users.

    That
might seem puny compared with the 143 million signing on in the United
States. But China’s numbers are growing exponentially and are expected
to reach 100 million by mid-decade. The country soon could boast the biggest
online population on Earth.

    The more
open society of modern China has brought not only unprecedented personal
freedom but also an explosion in juvenile crime.

    In a
country that not long ago was filled with young Communists so morally upright
that they would turn a penny found on the street over to police, juvenile
delinquents now regularly make the news, mirroring their naughty counterparts
in the West.

    Contrary
to what some Westerners–and members of the Chinese Communist Party–might
expect, many young Chinese Web surfers show only minimal interest in the
Internet as a tool for information gathering or political subversion. Like
youngsters around the globe, what they really crave is computer games.
Lots of computer games.

    To them,
wang bas function as a giant video arcade. At the cafe that burned, for
example, players paid less than $2 a night for all the games they wanted.
Even those who have their own terminals find the cafes cheaper, faster
and infinitely more fun than signing on from home or school, where parents
and teachers may be around to supervise.

    This
is a generation of spoiled only children–“little emperors,” as they’re
often called. They grew up in a society without devotion to God, Mao or
sometimes even their parents. The online world of violent games serves
as a kind of surrogate faith for many.

    Some
seem to delight in their addiction.

    At Beijing
Science and Technology University, which reportedly lost nine students
in the blaze, it was standing room only last week in one undergraduate
computer room, which is still open because it is part of the school’s academic
facility, not a wang ba.

    The vast
majority of the 100 or so students there were male, and virtually all the
on-screen activities were games.

    The atmosphere
was so charged, it felt like an actual combat zone, with players linking
up in online squads and firing away as if their lives depended on it.

    “If I
don’t play for one day, I can’t concentrate on anything,” said Liang Sai,
a 19-year-old chemistry major waiting for a terminal. “If you ban all the
Internet cafes, we’ll find somewhere else to play. You can’t stop us, because
we’re hooked.”

    For the
two boys accused of setting the deadly fire, the wang ba was practically
their second home.

    Both
Song’s grandson, who because of his age has been identified only by his
last name, Song, and his accomplice, identified as Zhang, have drug-addicted
fathers now in jail, said the grandfather.

    These
aren’t spoiled children. Song’s parents divorced before he was a year old.
He hasn’t seen his mother since he was 7. He grew up with his father, who
had a string of girlfriends. Some of them used to beat the boy, his grandfather
said.

    The grandparents
once found the boy, then 2, waiting for his father on a trash pile, chewing
on rotten fruit. Early this year, when his father went to jail, the boy
went to live with his grandfather, a 67-year-old widower who uses a wheelchair.

    Zhang
basically lived on his own in his mother’s bare apartment. She was never
around. A few weeks ago, young Song moved in with him, hauling over the
TV, refrigerator and washer from his father’s house. They smoked cigarettes
and literally played with fire, twice almost burning down the apartment,
the grandfather said.

    The grandson
pretended to go to school, but classmates said they rarely saw him. When
he did show up, he behaved like a bully, borrowing money he never returned
so he could head back to the Internet cafe.

    “He has
suffered too much pain. He’s not afraid of anything,” the older Song said.

    What
the boy needed, it seemed, was hope. Sometime last year, his mother called
his grandfather to say that if he did well in school, she would find a
way to take him to the United States. The thought that his mother still
cared seemed enough to transform the delinquent into an angel.

    “His
teachers were so shocked at his progress they cried during the PTA meeting,”
the grandfather said. “But then his father got into trouble, and the boy
gave up again.”

    The wang
ba became his refuge.

    Today,
the boys remain under police detention, pending further investigation and
possibly a trial.

    Entrepreneurs
say that if Beijing seizes on the wang ba fire to toughen regulations overall,
it could deal a serious blow to legitimate cyber cafes–which already are
weak competitors of the illegal operators, partly because they tend to
be nicer, safer and more expensive.

    “Without
good and simple regulations that distinguish between good and bad Internet
cafes, it’s very hard for entrepreneurs to invest in the business,” said
Edward Zeng, the self-proclaimed founder of China’s first upscale Internet
cafe in 1996.

    His cafes
actually serve coffee and turn away minors, but he said he’s paying a price
for following the law. In the last two years, poor business has forced
him to cut his chain of about 20 shops by half, he said.

    Only
about 10% of Beijing’s estimated 2,200 Internet cafes are legitimate, because
the state makes obtaining licenses very difficult. Illegal operators thrive–they
give young Web users what they want: 24-hour service for as little as 25
cents an hour, cigarettes, even cots to crash on. This makes for cheap
entertainment, even in China. Youngsters in school uniforms are the illicit
cafes’ main clientele.

    The Chinese
press is splattered with horror stories about the tragic consequences.

    A high
school sophomore came home late from a wang ba and confronted his angry
father, according to one account. Then the teenager leaped from the family’s
seventh-floor window.

    One middle
school student had been playing for so long that he insisted he was being
abducted by aliens. His parents sent him to a mental hospital.

    Parents
have tried begging and grounding. Some have cut their children’s allowance.
No matter–the kids borrowed, stole, sold their bicycles. Anything to keep
playing.

    Some
desperate parents have hired private detectives to hunt down children who
go missing for days. Others have formed neighborhood brigades to patrol
local haunts.

    But the
games go on.

    “It’s
a great way to kill time and fill emptiness,” said Liang, the chemistry
major. “Most of us can’t afford to travel or do other things for fun. I
don’t know about the girls, but for the guys, it’s our No. 1 recreational
activity.”

    When
the girls turn up, they tend to stay in a separate part of the room reading
e-mail and chatting online. Many drown out the noise from the game-crazed
boys by downloading pop songs and listening to them on headphones.

    Liang
said he likes to play as many as seven hours a day straight, and Saturdays
are usually all-nighters. On the night of the fire, he was playing at a
nearby wang ba when the blaze illuminated the sky.

    The two
alleged arsonists apparently bickered with the owners because they had
no money to play. So the boys torched the place with gasoline, according
to their confession.

    Those
who died were trapped on the second floor of the building. The only exit
was engulfed in flames–or perhaps locked from the outside. The windows
were bolted with steel bars, a common practice for owners afraid of inspectors
and computer theft.

    Bouquets
of yellow chrysanthemums appeared last week on the curb next to the gutted
building. Reading the messages of grief left most parents shaken and determined.

    Zo Jianjune,
the mother of a 21-year-old son who lives next door to the burned cafe,
said her husband had run to the wang ba, unbolted the steel bars and saved
seven people.

    “A crackdown
is absolutely necessary,” she said. “Otherwise, there’s no telling what
else could happen.”