At 9pm on February 1st in the Taiwanese city of Xinbei, a 23-year-old gamer named Chen Rongyou was found dead in his seat at an internet cafe, after buying two-eight hour sessions of online time. When discovered by police, he was stiff with rigor mortis, and his arms remained outstretched in front of him, with one hand reaching for the keyboard and another hand reaching for the mouse. more ›

An 11-year-old middle schooler obsessed with the internet is currently in the hospital after his mother resorted to slicing open his leg with a kitchen knife when she felt all other discouragement had failed. more ›

Who would've thought that a province in what most people normally think of as a nanny state would be the first to ban excessive prying by parents? Adults in Chongqing are no longer legally allowed to search through children's computers or phones. Of course, nobody believes the regulation will actually be followed, but how curious it is that it was passed in the first place! What kid, fed up with parental snooping, had the connections to push this through, I wonder. more ›

Internet addiction centers suck - at best, they haven't proven to be effective and at worst... well, there's the whole torture, beatings and "accidental deaths" thing to contend with. So it's no wonder that eight teens sentenced to one of these "clinics" would try to escape. Unfortunately, their daring plan only worked until they were caught by the police and handed over to their parents, who promptly put them back in the centers. Alas. more ›

Finally, someone got the idea to use gaming to help students instead of shoving them into oft dangerous internet addiction camps. Zhonghua Vocational School, here in Shanghai, has begun the first ever "Online Games" class. The thought is that these kids can learn the valuable skill of working in a group, as well as boost their self confidence, if they play World of Warcraft with proper guidance and supervision. While I'm not entirely sold on the curriculum (there's got to be more educational realms than Azeroth - all it's ever taught me is how annoying Chuck Norris jokes can get), at least its nice to know someone's recognizing that banning these things outright is probably not the way to go. more ›

The plague of disaffected over-connected and really, really emo youth has hit China! A recent study on the country's post-90s (born after 1990) generation, done by the Shanghai Teenage Research Center, has found that many teens feel happier surfing the internet rather than spending time with family or friends. These kids claim they are "always misunderstood by society." One, a freshman in Changning, says he doesn't like hanging out with his parents because "I can't communicate with them effectively." Wow! Watch out Shanghai - next thing you know, they'll be writing bad poetry on their livejournal equivalents and worshipping movies like Thirteen... and then they'll be virtually indistinguishable from American teens. more ›

Apparently, some people are calling this the first great Chinese film of 2010 and it's a machinima. The video, which has already gained a million hits in the various locations its been put up, is called "War of Internet Addiction" and made almost entirely from the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft. more ›

China’s Ministry of Health recently denied the existence of so-called ‘internet addiction’ as a problem for Chinese youth. You heard correctly- the ‘land of a thousand internet-addiction camps’ is apparently conflicted over whether to electrocute the problem out of its children or to simply ignore it entirely. more ›

It was about time we saw an Internet Addiction Treatment Center spoof. Danwei has found this great one, which uses clips from the CCTV program "War With the Internet Demon (战网魔)" which was intended to praise Dr. Yang Yongxin (杨永信) for his development of shock therapy for net addicts. more ›

You would think that all the news about the horrors of Chinese internet addiction camps would have dissuaded other countries from trying to start up their own. Not so! Apparently, a clinic has recently opened its doors in Washington state, 13 miles away from Microsoft's HQ. The reSTART Internet Addiction Recovery Program costs $14,500 USD and provides a 45-day intensive care program for game, Internet, and texting addicts. Activities include things like meandering along forested trails, learning to participate in home chores, and (allegedly) feeding baby goats. What?! Seems slightly more fun than our methods of beating kids - sometimes to death - and then firing the reporters that dare to write about it happening. more ›

Ministry of Health guidelines for Internet addiction are out and it looks like anyone who spends just 40 hours online each week can be considered an Internet addict. The draft definition was "based on research into the standards used by foreign countries and has also been influenced by China's experience with the problem," according to CRI English. We just took a good look at how many hours we're logged on each week and it seems like we could be considered internet addicts twice over. Uh oh. We hope this doesn't mean someone's booking us for one of those painfully deadly internet addict camps. more ›

It looks like all the bad press still hasn't reached parents who've sent their child to a "personality correction" boot camp. Another boy, 14-year-old Pu Liang, was beaten to a pulp at one of these camps and is now in critical condition at a hospital in Sichuan. His father says he's suffering from water in the lungs and kidney failure after being hit by the camp counselor and several other children. The training center has denied the accusations, saying that it was just the other students who beat up Pu because he couldn't get along with them. Pu had been sent there for becoming addicted to online games and telling his parents he no longer wanted to go to school. Source: China Daily more ›

• China earthquake activist on trial [AFP] "A Chinese activist who was investigating whether shoddy construction caused school collapses in last year's massive Sichuan earthquake went on trial for subversion, his lawyer said. Environmental activist and writer Tan Zuoren, who was charged with "inciting subversion of state power," is accused of defaming the ruling Communist Party and the government over their handling of the Tiananmen crackdown on pro-democracy protestors in 1989. Mr Tan's brief trial in Chengdu, capital of southwest Sichuan province, ended without a verdict, Pu Zhiqiang, one of his two lawyers, said."
• Chinese police detain supporters of quake critic [AP] "A high-profile Chinese government critic said he and 11 others were detained by police in a hotel Wednesday to prevent them from attending the trial of an activist who investigated the deaths of thousands of schoolchildren in last year's earthquake. Avant-garde artist Ai Weiwei said police in the southwestern city of Chengdu also roughed up him and one of the other supporters who had traveled to the city to try to attend the trial of Tan Zuoren, an activist charged with subversion. The charges Tan faces appear to be linked to his quake investigation as well as essays he wrote about the 1989 student-led demonstrations in Tiananmen Square that ended in a deadly military crackdown. Beijing routinely uses the charge of subversion to imprison dissidents for years."
• Murder at the 'reboot' camps [China Daily] "Deng Senshan had never skipped school, never been diagnosed with a mental illness and, according to his family, surfed the Web only on weekends. Yet on Aug 1, the 15-year-old was admitted to a rehab camp for Internet addiction (IA), where, after being ordered to run 5 km as part of his "treatment", he was beaten to death by counselors."

Yikes these internet addiction camps just sound scarier and scarier the more we hear about them. After news of Deng, a 16-year-old who was beaten to death as part of a "personality training program," got out, Southern Metropolis Daily decided to investigate by going to a related training camp in Guangzhou. According to the translation by Danwei, the training camps were still in operation despite educational authorities' declarations that they had been halted. Children on the third and fourth floors, when they saw the reporters, began sticking notes into aluminum cans, drink bottles and slippers. They held up bamboo mats with the letters "SOS" written on them and some bore papers and clothes scrawled with the words "beatings" and "help." They were all stopped by the instructors. We've got chills. more ›

According to Netease, a junior high school graduate, Deng, who hadn't yet turned 16 was beaten into death around 3AM yesterday in Nanning city of Guangxi province, as part of his training to build confidence and correct bad habits. more ›