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WP: China treats Internet addicts sternly
Leaders see a grave social problem; treatment includes electric shocks
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
The Washington Post
Updated: 10:25 a.m. ET Feb 22, 2007
DAXING, China - Sun Jiting spends his days locked behind metal bars in this military-run installation, put there by his parents. The 17-year-old high school student is not allowed to communicate with friends back home, and his only companions are psychologists, nurses and other patients. Each morning at 6:30, he is jolted awake by a soldier in fatigues shouting, "This is for your own good!"
Sun's offense: Internet addiction.
Alarmed by a survey that found that nearly 14 percent of teens in China are vulnerable to becoming addicted to the Internet, the Chinese government has launched a nationwide campaign to stamp out what the Communist Youth League calls "a grave social problem" that threatens the nation.
Few countries have been as effective historically in fighting drug and alcohol addiction as China, which has been lauded for its successes, as well as criticized for harsh techniques.
Now the country is turning its attention to fighting another, supposed addiction -- one that has been blamed in the state-run media for a murder over virtual property earned in an online game, for a string of suicides and for the failure of youths in their studies.
The Chinese government in recent months has joined South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam in taking measures to try to limit the time teens spend online. It has passed regulations banning youths from Internet cafes and has implemented control programs that kick teens off networked games after five hours.
There's a global controversy over whether heavy Internet use should be defined as a mental disorder, with some psychologists, including a handful in the United States, arguing that it should be. Backers of the notion say the addiction can be crippling, leading people to neglect work, school and social lives.
But no country has gone quite as far as China in embracing the theory and mounting a public crusade against Internet addiction. To skeptics, the campaign dovetails a bit too nicely with China's broader effort to control what its citizens can see on the Internet. The Communist government runs a massive program that limits Web access, censors sites and seeks to control online political dissent. Internet companies like Google have come under heavy criticism abroad for going along with China's demands.
In the Internet-addiction campaign, the government is helping to fund eight in-patient rehabilitation clinics across the country.
Mild electric shocks
The clinic in Daxing, a suburb of Beijing, the capital, is the oldest and largest, with 60 patients on a normal day and as many as 280 during peak periods. Few of the patients, who range in age from 12 to 24, are here willingly. Most have been forced to come by their parents, who are paying upward of $1,300 a month -- about 10 times the average salary in China -- for the treatment.
Led by Tao Ran, a military researcher who built his career by treating heroin addicts, the clinic uses a tough-love approach that includes counseling, military discipline, drugs, hypnosis and mild electric shocks.
Tao said the clinic is based on the idea that there are many similarities between his current patients and those he had in the past.
In terms of withdrawal: "If you let someone go online and then he can't go online, you may see a physical reaction, just like someone coming off drugs." And in terms of resistance: "Today you go half an hour, and the next day you need 45 minutes. It's like starting with drinking one glass and then needing half a bottle to feel the same way."
Located on an army training base, the Internet-addiction clinic is distinct from the other buildings on campus because of the metal grates and padlocks on every door and the bars on every window.
On the first level are 10 locked treatment rooms geared toward treating teen patients suffering from disturbed sleep, lack of motivation, aggression, depression and other problems. Unlike the rest of the building, which is painted in blues and grays and kept cold to keep the teens alert, these rooms are sunny and warm.
Inside Room No. 8 are toys and other figurines that the teens can play with while psychologists watch. Room 10 contains rows of fake machine guns that the patients use for role-play scenarios that are supposed to bridge the virtual world with the real one.
Room No. 4 is made up to look like home, with rattan furniture and fake flowers, to provide a comfortable place for counselors to talk to the teens. The staff tries to blend into the artificial environment. Before meeting with a patient, one counselor swapped her olive military uniform for a motherly cardigan and plaid skirt.
Among the milder cases are those of Yu Bo, 21, from Inner Mongolia, and Li Yanjiang, 15, from Hebei province. Both said that they used to spend four to five hours a week online and their daily lives weren't affected but that their parents wanted them to cut their computer usage to zero so they could study. Yu said he agreed to come because he wanted to train himself. Li said it was because he just wanted to "get away from my parents."
Perceived as a more serious case is that of He Fang, 22, a college student from the western region of Xinjiang. The business administration major said his grades tanked when he started playing online games several hours a night. The clinic "has mainly helped me change the way I think," he said. "It's not about getting away from pressure but facing it and dealing with it."
Before Sun, the 17-year-old, who is from the city of Cangzhou, checked into the clinic about a month ago, he said, he was sometimes online playing games for 15 hours nonstop. "My life was not routine -- day and night I was messed up," he said.
In December, he concluded that school just "wasn't interesting" and stopped attending. His parents were furious and complained that he didn't have a goal. Exasperated, they eventually checked him into the clinic.
Since he's been there, Sun said, he's decided to finish high school, attend college and then work at a private company, perhaps becoming an "authority figure" one day. With the help of a counselor, he's mapped out a life plan from now until he's 84.
Sun's father and mother, Sun Fengxiang and Xu Ying, both 41 and accountants, say their son's counselors have told them he's behaving well -- playing basketball, reading books about success -- but they are unsure whether he's really been cured.
"His language shows that he has changed, but we'll see" when Sun gets home, his father said.
No one is comfortable talking about the third floor of the clinic, where serious cases -- usually two or three at a time -- are housed. Most have been addicted to the Internet for five or more years, Tao said, are severely depressed and refuse counseling. One sliced his wrists but survived. These teens are under 24-hour supervision.
Their souls are gone to the online world
Tao said he believes 70 percent of the teens, after one to three months of treatment, will go home and lead normal lives, but he's less optimistic about the third-floor patients. "Their souls are gone to the online world," he said.
Earlier this month, four teens fled their dorm rooms and jumped in a taxi. They made it to a train station before soldiers caught them, according to Li Jiali, a military guard. They were isolated and asked to write reports about why their actions were wrong.
Guo Tiejun, a school headmaster turned psychologist who runs an Internet-addiction research center in Shanghai, said the military-run clinic goes too far in treating Internet addicts like alcohol and drug addicts.
He said that he has treated several former patients of the Daxing clinic and that one mother told him it was simply "suffering for a month" that did not help her son. He advocates a softer approach. Guo said he believes that the root of the problem is loneliness and that the most effective treatment is to treat the teens "like friends."
"Our conclusion is that kids who get addicted in society have some kind of disability or weakness. They can't make friends, can't fulfill their desire of social communication, so they go online," Guo said.
Guo is especially critical of the use of medications -- which include antidepressants, antipsychotics, and a variety of other pills and intravenous drips -- for Internet addiction because, he said, that approach treats symptoms, not causes.
Tao and his team of 15 doctors and nurses defended the treatment methods. He said that while some clinics depend wholly on medications -- in one experiment conducted in Ningbo, a city south of Shanghai, suspected Internet addicts were given the same pills as drug addicts -- only one out of five patients at the Daxing clinic receive prescription drugs. Tao did agree with Guo that Internet addiction is usually an expression of deeper psychological problems.
"We use these medicines to give them happiness," Tao said, "so they no longer need to go on the Internet to be happy."
Still, for all the high-tech treatments available to Sun at the clinic, the one that he says helped him most was talking. He looks forward to returning to school and getting on with his life.
The first task on his agenda when he gets home: get online. He needs to tell his worried Internet friends where he was these past few weeks.
Seems to be progressing s l o w l y that direction.