Obsessed With the Internet: A Tale From China

* By Christopher S. Stewart Email Author
* January 13, 2010 |
* 3:00 pm |
* Wired Feb 2010


The camp in Qihang promised to cure children of so-called Internet addiction, an ailment that has grown into one of China’s most feared public health hazards.
Illustration: Mark Weaver; background image: Getty; Sinopix

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.”

They didn’t get to say good-bye. This is what Deng Fei and Zhou Juan would remember afterward, the absence of closure. Deng Senshan’s parents handed over 7,000 yuan (about $1,000) for one month of treatment, then watched as their son was taken to a room just off the basketball court. Camp officials advised them to go. It was better for his recovery, they said. As she left, however, Zhou Juan couldn’t resist taking one last look at her son. Through a crack in the door, she saw him slumped in a chair, head bowed. “He looked so sad,” she recalls. “If he had looked up then and said, ‘Get me out of here,’ I would have taken him home.” He didn’t look up.
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One of the first signs that things had gotten out of hand in China’s Internet-addiction camps was the emergence of Uncle Yang — Yang Yongxin — a psychiatrist who opened a treatment center at a state-owned hospital in eastern Shandong Province in 2006. His camp was one of hundreds that had sprung up in China — many of them unregulated, uncredentialed, and relying on a grab bag of treatments: antidepressants, counseling, even intense physical exertion. (One sent its young clients on a 528-mile trek through Inner Mongolia.) What began as a fairly well-regarded and disciplined approach had spun into a growth industry, packed with untrained entrepreneurs.

Yang’s battery of therapies included electroshock — known as xing nao, or “brain waking.” Electrodes were attached to his patients’ hands and temples, then shot through with 1 to 5 milliamps of electricity. One girl recalled wearing a mouth guard to prevent her from biting off her tongue. Some sessions apparently went on for a half hour; occasionally, a shock was said to leave burns. In an interview with a local paper, Yang defended the practice, saying, “It doesn’t cause any damage to the brain. But it is painful, quite painful!”

Yang was not a psychotherapist, nor was he licensed to administer electroshock. But that didn’t matter. He claimed to know what he was doing. “It will clear the mind,” he promised. He charged almost $900 per month — a remarkable sum for a country in which the average monthly wage is around $400. Still, some 3,000 desperate parents sent their kids to him for four-month stints. The media hailed Yang as a “national Web-addiction expert,” recounting his heroic tales of life at his rehab center. Even after Yang’s methods were deemed excessive — in July, Chinese authorities banned electroshock as an Internet-addiction treatment, claiming the tactic required further study — his services were reportedly still in demand.

Meanwhile, the rhetoric around Internet addiction grew even more hysterical: The Net was not just a public-health hazard but a national-security risk. In 2006, the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League openly fretted about a “severe social problem that could threaten the nation’s future” and called Internet cafés “hotbeds of juvenile crime and depravity.” Official figures claimed that the Internet was responsible for up to 80 percent of high school and college dropouts and most juvenile crimes. A show on state-run television described the fight against Internet addiction as the Third Opium War.

It seemed as though almost anything could be blamed on the Internet. In September, the deputy director of China’s volleyball administration said the weak performance of the women’s national volleyball team was the result of “too much time online.”

Even Tao Ran, the father of the boot camp, began worrying that people were overreacting. “I get calls from parents who think their kids are addicted to the Internet just because they’re in front of the computer,” he says. “There is a hypersensitivity to addiction now, and the climate is getting worse.” He isn’t alone in his concern. “I told the government, ‘You have to stop this,’” says Tao Hongkai, an education researcher at Huazhong Normal University. He believes in treating addicts, but through talk therapy, which can sometimes last hours. “Parents are spending a lot of money to send their kids to these camps,” he says. “I told the government, ‘It’s going to get out of control.’ But they didn’t do anything.”
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When the other campers were sent to bed, around 9 pm, Deng Senshan and three other new arrivals were instructed to run laps around the basketball courts under klieg lights. By now, Deng Senshan didn’t resist much; he ran about 30 laps before he stumbled and fell. A counselor dragged him to a nearby flagpole and hit him with a wooden chair leg, which broke. Deng Senshan begged for him to stop, pushed himself up, and continued running. He made it halfway around the court before collapsing again. “Do you want to run?” the counselor yelled, strutting over with a plastic stool, which he swung down on the boy.

Deng Senshan crumpled to the concrete and stopped moving. There were at least a half-dozen witnesses. A security guard, who watched with shock from the tiny room where he lived at the edge of the school grounds, knew the child was in trouble: “I told my wife, ‘This boy will be lucky if he lives through the night.’”

After the beating, Deng Senshan was carried trembling to his bunk, shouting, “They’re killing me,” and bleeding from his mouth, ears, eyes, and nose. The counselors left him there for hours before dispatching a car to take him to the hospital. At around 3 am, 14 hours after arriving at the camp, he was pronounced dead.

It’s a September morning — the day that Deng Senshan would have started high school. His parents walk through crowded streets to their bright third-floor apartment. A month has passed since their son died. As they tell their story, Zhou Juan cries into her hands and Deng Fei fiddles with his keys.

Recently, Deng Fei came to a conclusion: His son was never addicted. “He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink. The Internet was probably his way to vent the pressure on him,” he says, staring at his feet. “We didn’t know that then. But we know that now. It wasn’t really an addiction. It was his way out of the pressure of being a student.” Zhou Juan raises her head. “He didn’t even play that much,” she says.

More than a dozen people were jailed for Deng Senshan’s death, and it would later be reported that the camp founder — who had branded himself as an educational and psychological expert — had never even been to high school, let alone college. Deng Fei would also learn that the camp’s TV ad was a fraud — those smiling family members were actually paid actors.

Deng Senshan’s death was the first of a small wave of terrifying reports. A few days after his murder, counselors at a camp in Hubei province beat to death a 14-year-old boy. Six days later, a teenager ended up in intensive care after sustaining injuries at another camp. The reports sparked cries for a government crackdown. “No one regulates the industry,” says Tao Ran, who has become one of the foremost proponents for increased oversight. In late 2008, Tao, hoping to eliminate uncertainty and confusion, began publicizing what he believed were the defining characteristics of a true Internet addict: playing online for at least six hours a day for three months straight and experiencing a profound sense of emotional, even physical, loss when unplugged from the Net. He also began lobbying the Chinese government to officially recognize the condition as a mental illness. But he is up against a juggernaut. There are thought to be between 300 and 400 camps in China.

Meanwhile, the local government began facing criticism for its part in the disaster. The camp’s advertisements had aired on government-run television stations, and the facility, it turns out, was located on state-subsidized school property. Government officials responded by trying to quash the reports of what had happened to Deng Senshan. A journalist was fired after publishing a series of articles about the case for the local paper. According to a news account, he had “angered top officials” in exposing “the weakness in governance.” Later, another journalist who covered the story was reportedly sacked.

But the usual strong-arm tactics couldn’t contain the public-relations disaster. The government eventually compensated Deng Fei and Zhou Juan for their son’s death — a seeming acknowledgement of the local government’s indirect role in the murder — even as officials rebuffed Deng Fei’s demand for an apology. And in November, China’s Ministry of Health drafted guidelines for boot camps, banning the use of physical punishment, “destructive surgeries,” and forced lockups. Tao Ran describes the policy as a hopeful “first step”; education researcher Tao Hongkai dismisses it as damage control. “I’m not sure how much it will do,” he says.

It certainly won’t do anything for Deng Senshan. His old bedroom is almost empty now. Some white curtains decorated with the colorful words “always together” adorn the sole window. His treadmill rests folded up in a corner. A small table holding burning incense and a few pictures serves as a humble shrine. Most everything else that belonged to him has been burned — a regional tradition for sending off the dead.

But in their own room, Deng Fei and Zhou Juan keep one more of their son’s possessions: his computer. It sits on a desk, turned off, the screen black. Before they’d taken him to the camp, Deng Senshan had saved a bunch of family photos on his hard drive. Wiping a tear from her eye, Zhou Juan talks about the computer not as a symbol of addiction or fear but as a storehouse of memories that will always be available, no matter what. Deng Senshan told her so, she says. “He said that the computer was safe.”

Christopher S. Stewart (christophersstewart@gmail.com) is currently writing a book about the search for a lost city in the jungles of Honduras.