A friend mentioned this to me when I was back in Hong Kong: Young professionals, after overworking themselves far past midnight, gather in McDonalds armed with… PSPs and Nintendo DSs.
Even though they are strangers to one another, they will get together for a good multiplayer game of, say, Monster Hunter. It’s popular enough that one local gaming magazine published a list of McDonalds to play.
They even offer 20 whole minutes of free Wifi! (Free Wifi is not easy to find in Hong Kong.)
OK. This is just…where things are going. Ten minutes of nasty American pop music, teenage hormones, voyeurism, and sheer curiosity, raging in broken English. From an Internet cafe in China to a bedroom in some (I’m guessing) Eastern European country. "You make me vidio/I kill you" and "I have this photo in my home. You give me." They make plans to talk on 56.com. Where does the music come from? How do they know each other?
Wikipedia introduces, "Huang Shan (黄山; literally Yellow Mountain) is a mountain range in southern Anhui province in eastern China. The area is very famous for its scenic beauty…"
First up, on the outskirts of the 古村 （Old/Ancient Village)，宏村 (HongCun)：
Inside: computers and desks and kids. The usual.
Next up, in a more urban 老街 (Old Street) in 黄山:
(Didn’t have a chance to check this one out.)5
Not a conclusive guide or anything, but I was pleasantly surprised to find one in a 古村.
So says a Chinese professor when discussing the educational experiences of Chinese youth in Internet cafes. A recent controversy surrounding the strict regulation of Internet cafes, played out over the past 6 months in the small town of Fangshan in Shanxi province, reveals the very real concerns of parents, educators, businesspeople, and bureaucrats about what the Internet is for, who should be able to access it, and who will profit financially from it.
Thanks to Roland Soong at ESWN for translating a long article on the Fangshan situation. In Fangshan, a town of less than 30,000 people, a rash of illegally operating Internet cafes were shut down with an "iron fist" by the local country secretary, prompting national media coverage. The clampdown was driven by issues of illegal operation, inappropriate targeting of minors (the vast majority of users are under 18), and what sounds like basic disturbance of the peace as local officials were repeatedly called in by parents who wanted to find a way to keep their children from playing games rather than studying. From the ESWN translation:
The city encourages green [Note: green here means morally healthy] Internet centers in the streets. The libraries in Wuxi city are doing that. We feel that we have to provide outlets for the children to go to," said Wuxi city deputy mayor Zhou Jiaqing. "Adults and young people should have strictly segregated areas of Internet access," said professor Ling Yun…
"The children should get on the Internet cafes organized by specially designated organizations instead of purely commercial operations, because this affects our next generation."
Professor Ling Yun recommends: "First, the schools ought to prove the venues. Then the cultural and especially the education departments ought to assume the responsibility, such as seriously managing the Internet
cafes. The adults can go to the commercial Internet cafes. That will be easier to manage."
Reporting from an up-scale netbar (520数码天地) in Chaoyang, Beijing.
Here, seats are grouped into single-computer cocoons & round-table group-play canopies on top of the usual cluster-rows. The Saturday-afternoon clientele includes expatriate youth.
Below are the top 10 shows watched, all free once you pay the hourly computer usage fee:
They are, in order:
a wuxia serial (Taiwan)
a wuxia serial (Mainland), see this post about it being mocked on BBSs.
cgi shorts (N.Amer)
a gangster movie (HK)
sanguo Flash shorts (Taiwan)
an occult movie (HK)
a sci-fi 美女 movie (HK)
an action movie (N.Amer)
a sci-fi action movie (N.Amer)
a gangster comedy (I’m guessing here) movie (HK)
They are thumbnailed, in order:
What surprised me most was that people were still watching Replacement Killers, Chow Yun Fat’s (80s HK movie star) first foray into Hollywood during 1998. After all, there are better guns movies (his older HK-based ones), and, despite the leggy poster, there are "leggier" movies (the movies on its left and right may be candidates for that category). So why is it still so popular?
Lhamo Tsering is a young Tibetan woman who lives in a village with her family in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Dechen. In 2003 I did anthropological research for my master’s thesis and Lhamo and her family graciously offered me to live with them. I stayed with them for seven months.
Most village houses have electricity for lighting, but for cooking the villagers normally use open fire. Nobody has internet access or a computer in their house.
In the nearest town, Gyalthang town (Shangri La) [previously blogged], which is half an hour away on a bicycle, there are a few Internet cafés. Sometimes Lhamo would go with me to the Internet café and one day I had an email account set up for her.
The main road in Gyalthang town.
Since then, she has been emailing with those of her friends who also have email accounts and Lhamo and I have also kept in contact using email. The other day she told me that apart from emailing she has started using QQ.com to chat with her friends in Lhasa and other towns. "You can have Tibetan installed on your computer" she explains, but most of the people she knows use either Chinese or English both for emails and chats.
Xinhua [official Chinese news service] reports: Tsinghua Tongfang Co Ltd, in partnership with microprocessor supplier
AMD, will sell PCs to Internet cafes in China. There are roughly
113,800 such hotspots around the country…Tongfang said the Internet cafe’s PC market size in China is between 6
million and 10 million units, and these PCs are upgraded every 18
months.
A nice market to serve. In the state’s quest to better control what goes on in Internet cafes, it is trying to roll out a nationwide Internet cafe franchise, which will apparently include branded PCs by Tongfang, China’s no. 3 PC maker. But Tongfang will only get 20% of the Internet cafe business; 4 other Chinese PC makers will make up the rest (20% each?).
Intel developed its Platform Administration technology (PAT) in 2004 for the Chinese Internet cafe market. PAT is a server-based technology for maintaining large networks of identically configured PCs. John Du, director of the Intel China Research Center in Beijing, says:
"Our sales and marketing guys look at the Internet
cafes and say there’s a huge opportunity to address problems doing
upgrades and maintenance…" "The sales and marketing
guys go back to the software service solutions group in Shanghai to
develop a solution to help Internet cafes to do upgrades, monitor their
PCs, and do maintenance."
link to Xinhua article on Tongfang link to BusinessWeek article on foreign companies mainland Chinese research centers (source of John Du quote) link here and here to articles on Intel’s PAT
China Tech News notes that Shenzhen is one of the cities officially allowed to ramp up Internet cafe development.
According to a representative from
the Shenzhen Municipal Cultural Bureau, Shenzhen has been listed as one
of the nine trial cities in China to set up Internet cafe long-term
management mechanisms and been approved to develop a total of 1060 new
locations.
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