A group of teenagers and twenty-somethings staged an elaborate break-out of an Internet boot camp in China’s Jiangsu province earlier this month.
The 14 young people covered their counselor in a blanket and hog-tied him to a chair before making their escape from the “jie-wang” (quit the internet) camp at Huai’an Internet Addiction Treatment Center on June 3. When the counselor screamed, they hit him while apologizing at the same time. They had been practicing the feat with a rope for days.
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The 14 young people – aged 15 to 22 – were all returned to the camp, with some facing tearful and ashamed parents. Families had paid some 18,000 RMB (US$2,600) for their child to spend six months at the rehab camp, of which more than three months remained.
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While some of China’s internet addiction programs are run in hospitals by healthcare professionals, many others are fly-by-night operations that employ questionable methods. This is thought to include electric shock treatments, even though Beijing’s Health Ministry banned the practice in 2009.
More:
http://www.weirdasianews.com/2010/06/23/china-youths-flee-internet-boot-camp/See also:
Obsessed With the Internet: A Tale From China
On a hot afternoon in August, a mother, father, and son climbed into their car and set out for the Qihang Salvation Training Camp in rural China. The facility was only a half hour from their hotel in Nanning, but the drive felt much longer to Deng Fei and Zhou Juan. In the backseat, their son, Deng Senshan, said almost nothing the entire way. He wore a sickish look as he gazed at the whizzing tableau of warehouses, unfinished buildings, and open fields of southern China’s Guangxi province. He didn’t want to go to the camp — who would? — but his parents felt they had no choice.
The Qihang camp promised to cure children of so-called Internet addiction, an ailment that has grown into one of China’s most feared public health hazards. The camp’s brochure claimed that an estimated 80 percent of Chinese youth suffered from it. Fifteen-year-old Deng Senshan seemed to be among them. He was once a top student, but his grades had plummeted over the past couple of years, and he had stopped exercising almost completely. He spent most of his time playing games like World of Warcraft at Internet cafés or on his desktop computer. The Chinese news media was filled with terrifying stories of WOW-crazed kids dropping dead or killing their parents, and Deng Fei and Zhou Juan worried that they might lose their only son to a technological demon they barely understood. So they were lured in by the camp’s pledge to end his “bad behavior.”
Yet when the place finally came into view, it wasn’t the traditional school-like setting Deng Fei had imagined. Instead, it looked more like a poorly tended jailhouse — decrepit three-story concrete building, barred windows, overgrown bushes. In the distance, through a field of high razor-edged grass, a factory smokestack spewed a black cloud. On a double basketball court, a gang of camouflage-clad teenagers were in the middle of a sweaty training session in the subtropical heat. Counselors, dressed in black shirts with military-police patches on their chests, stood watch.
The family got out of the car. It was about 1 o’clock. “I don’t want to stay here,” Deng Senshan pleaded. Deng Fei suppressed a tinge of uncertainty as he looked at his son. “This will be good for you,” he promised. “You’ll be out in a month, fit and strong.” His mother joked that he’d get a bit of a suntan. But she, too, was trying to stifle anxieties. At one point, she pulled a counselor aside to ask why the camp was so remote and why children were forced to exercise in such heat. “At home, kids are much too comfortable,” he responded, and told her that hardship was part of the cure. “You don’t beat the kids, do you?” she asked. The man waved away the question, assuring her, “We use only psychological treatment here.”
More:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_internetaddiction/
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