Youth and Internet Addiction in China

Trent Bax

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135097028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios étnicos

A form of 'electronic opium' is how some people have characterised young people's internet use in China. The problem of 'internet addiction' ( wangyin ) is seen by some parents as so severe that they have sought psychiatric help for their children. This book, which is based on extensive original research, including discussions with psychiatrists, parents and 'internet-addicted' young people, explores the conflicting attitudes which this issue reveals. It contrasts the views of young people who see internet use, especially gaming, as a welcome escape from the dehumanising pressures of contemporary Chinese life, with the approach of those such as their parents, who medicalise internet overuse and insist that working hard for good school grades is the correct way to progress. The author shows that these contrasting attitudes lead to battles which are often fierce and violent, and argues that the greater problem may in fact lie with parents and other authority figures, who misguidedly apply high pressure to enforce young people to conform to the empty values of a modern, dehumanised consumer-oriented society.

1 Log in

A walk into the wild frontier with Renfei

Initially, I envisioned becoming an ethnographer by employing the ethnographic method of participant-observation to acquire knowledge of this phenomenon called “internet addiction.” By observing, and thus by implication participating in the activities young people engage in while hanging out in internet bars, I envisioned understanding the world of those in China whose waking and dreaming lives are dominated by computer technologies. The initial set of probing questions centered upon discovering what is it that attracts them to games such as World of Warcraft to such a degree that they are willing to spend in excess of six hours at any one time plugged into it – and then finding themselves labeled as “internet addicts” by their parents and people such as Tao Ran. I was also interested in discovering what is it about the internet bar which attracts China’s youth with such intensity and devotion that they are willing – in their tens of millions – to spend large amounts of their waking, eating and sleeping hours in this light-deprived/light-intensive smoked-filled space seemingly isolated from the normal functioning of society, yet at the same time, plugged into a virtual world with both virtual and real characters.

Ever since the production of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific have ethnographers embedded themselves into a social setting with the desire for understanding, from the ground up, the social reality of social organization. Understanding the social reality of young people labeled “internet addicts” is especially important because, as one of China’s leading film makers Jia Zhangke pointed out, when many of China’s young speak, nobody listens.¹ As a result they have few opportunities to express their ideas and to assert their opinions about society.² By “letting them speak” and by focusing upon the conditions in which their social reality arises we can, as R.W. Connell argued, paint a collective portrait – using language – of a group of people caught up in a certain process of social transformation.³ Michael Burawoy said real workers should be examined in real productive circumstances, and so should real internet users be examined in real productive circumstances.⁴

Therefore I first sought out a close and trusted friend, called Renfei, to introduce me to the world of online gaming. I decided to hang out with Renfei not only because we already had an established trust-based relationship,⁵ but also because for Renfei the internet is not simply part of his life but, as he put it: “The internet is my life.” Therefore I lived with 26-year-old Renfei in Dalian city, Liaoning Province, for two months at the end of 2008 as a way of observing, at close hand and in a natural intimate setting, the lifeworld of a young Chinese man who could, if subjected to the commonly held criteria for categorizing internet addiction, in theory be labeled as an “internet addict” because he was spending about 12 hours per day online – thus exceeding, by double, the six-hour-per-day threshold currently being advocated (details are provided later). Through Renfei and his family and friends I sought, following Turkle’s method for understanding internet-mediated relations, to enquire into a) how netizens and those concerned about internet use perceive the technology, b) what motivates people to use this technology, and c) what users obtain and lose by using it. As Turkle argued, this is to highlight not only what computers do for them but also what computers do to them.⁶ Basically, this required hanging out with Renfei in order to see the dynamic flux of experience as it becomes through, and not outside of, time.⁷

I quickly discovered that surrounding Renfei’s apartment one could literally locate an internet bar on every street corner.⁸ I was attracted to one internet bar in particular because of its auspicious name: The Free Space Internet Bar. As Renfei had informed me beforehand, if I purchased a rechargeable membership card I could acquire 110 hours for 100 yuan, or 50 hours for 50 yuan, which is half the price of the normal rate of 2 yuan per hour. Thus, the more one “invests” in internet time the cheaper it is, which means that the economic model of the internet bar must be seen, from the outset, as playing a part in enticing young people to spend longer and longer periods of time online.

The first thing observed in the internet bar is that which one observes when encountering the Chinese city: atomization. Netizens were intensely focused on the machine in front of them, with many males constantly yelling out – to themselves, their friends or opponents within the game – the harshest possible expressions within the Chinese language. While it is easy to frame their cursing as a sign of moral decay, this strips away the functional component of these expressions as, for example, mantras or slogans “recited” by the frustrated, the angry, the estranged, and the competitive. While many would come to the internet bar with friends, or come to meet friends, socializing was mostly conducted through their separate computers as they were either playing against each other or playing as a team against others. We could say they were together-apart. This is partly an outcome of the physical structure of the internet bar itself, as it is designed – with computers lined up in rows – generally for individual and not group play.

With each user attached to the computer in front of them in a state of intense play, and often wearing headphones, then it was very difficult to make contact with them. In a way the netizen is not in the internet bar itself, but paradoxically, in cyberspace. For the lone user the internet bar is a kind of interface between the real and virtual world. Thus after a number of unsuccessful visits to different internet bars I realized that to understand the online gamer in action one needs to go where they existentially are, and that is in cyberspace. Renfei therefore said: “You need to get inside in order to understand the research. You have to get lost in order to be clear.”

I very quickly became lost in Perfect World. Before playing the Chinese manufactured game Perfect World a technician in an internet bar helped to open my account, showed me how to create my avatar and how to begin to play the game. Once left to my own devices, however, I quickly became lost, unable to carry out the basic tasks required to advance within the game. Nevertheless, I have since learnt that Perfect World can be visualized as a kind of metaphor for understanding what is so attractive about the internet for China’s youth. The game is designed to have your avatar – as the center of a perfect world – meet up with other avatars that will help you while, at the same time, other players come to you asking if you want to play with them. The emphasis is on “warm” social relations based, ideally, on equality, trust, sharing and mutual benefit. Interestingly, one’s avatar also has the power to fly, which can be understood as a metaphor symbolizing the search for freedom I outline later as an important “pull” factor drawing them in to cyberspace. Or as Renfei’s ex-work colleague sang while sitting on a mini-stage in a private karaoke room surrounded by her work colleagues: “Come along with me to a faraway frontier borderland.”⁹

Perfect World is a kind of enchanted pastoral world, full of green rolling hills, trees, sparse physical infrastructure, no cars, meandering dirt tracks, and few people. Basically, a world that is in important ways the binary opposite of their “real” life, which is densely urban and bursting with buildings, cars and certain strangers who rather than wanting to help you sometimes want to deceive you or even dismiss you completely. For example, while chatting to “rain” online I asked her what is good about the city of Jingzhou where she lives. “Everything is good,” she replied, “but the people.” She said they are “bad” because they often steal. Likewise, Renfei himself said one day: “There are so many thieves around it is frustrating.” And while hanging out with Renfei’s friend Zhaonan in his home-city of Anshan late one evening she received a call from her worried mother. According to Zhaonan there are “lots of bad people around.” This fear of the stranger and of becoming a potential victim of crime resulted in Zhaonan ringing her mother once the taxi had arrived at her apartment, wherein the mother came down to the street level to collect her hopefully-safe daughter. Little wonder that young people are so attracted to going to a perfect world. Nevertheless, it teaches us that the virtual world only makes sense if we understand their real world – and, most importantly, the interconnection between the two.

Renfei subsequently taught me how to play the video games World of Warcraft and Counter Strike. In order to experience, first-hand, what it was like to spend hours in a smoke-filled internet bar playing games with friends we frequented on a number of occasions one of the local internet bars to play Counter Strike. Instead of just “killing” each other we instead decided to do what most gamers do, and that was to form a team so that we could then work together to achieve the goals set out within the game. The effect of doing so was to strengthen our friendship, as through working and strategizing together you become a team. As Renfei said, playing online games together cannot only bring friendships closer together but can also turn acquaintances into “true” friends. In a society where making “true” friends is often difficult, we should not be too surprised that online games are seen as so attractive to people searching for a sense of belonging and relatedness.

In addition, he also helped me to open up a QQ address so that I could chat to people.¹⁰ On QQ I discovered a whole range of chatrooms where netizens can go to find a friend or partner, chat about online games, favorite hobbies, music, etc. I used these chatrooms in order to chat freely with people throughout China, wherein I asked them about their lives in general and their feelings toward, and opinions on, online gaming and the internet. Unlike meeting these complete strangers in an internet bar face-to-face, wherein one would be guarded about what one says, I found them to be incredibly open and forthright. In trying to make sense of this phenomenon, Renfei noted that young people in China are generally more open in expressing themselves while messaging online. “They don’t care about losing face,” he explained, “because online they don’t have a face, it is faceless.” He also said that while the appearance online can be faked (name, address, gender, age, etc), the feelings and emotions expressed are often very real. They may change the “façade” or outer appearance of their presentation-of-self while online but they tend to not hide their feelings.

While hanging out with Renfei and his family and friends provided me with useful empirical and experiential data, and while the conversations I had on QQ with people scattered across China supplied me with worthwhile auxiliary material, I had yet to encounter my first “internet addict.” In order to move from the lives of “normal” young people wherein the internet is deeply embedded into their entire lifeworld, and toward the lives of “abnormal” young people called “internet addicts” where the internet is said to have consumed their life, I decided to make contact with Mr. Tao Hongkai.

The two Taos and the oscillating Keith Bakker

Before outlining my experience with Tao Hongkai it is imperative we first situate not only the work of Tao Hongkai, but also the complicated relationship to his nemesis and the main proponent of the internet addiction disorder, Mr. Tao Ran.

Tao Hongkai is an educator who spent 18 years working in the US and returned to Wuhan in 2003 to retire quietly. One day, however, his attention was drawn to a newspaper article about a girl said to be “addicted” to the internet and her seemingly helpless and distraught mother. Tao Hongkai subsequently called the family and after several hours chatting with them the daughter agreed to give up the internet and return back to focusing on her schoolwork. After this initial success, Mr. Tao encountered unexpected fame and became an idol for parents whose children spent too much time online. Parents from far and wide began seeking out his guidance. Between 2004 and 2011 he spent his days and nights traveling all over China appearing on TV programs, giving interviews, taking courses, and visiting schools and boot camps spreading an education- and communication-based method. By describing his method as “quality education” (suzhi jiaoyu), Tao Hongkai was attaching himself to a debate over national education policy and ideology that, since 1985, has focused on using education to improve the “suzhi” (quality) of the Chinese population.¹¹ At the same time he has been involved in a very public battle with military-psychiatrist Tao Ran over the public discourse of problematic internet use. While Tao Ran has been advocating – using the internet addiction concept – a psychiatric-based medicalized discourse for framing the problem, Tao Hongkai has been arguing that what China is facing is a set of societal problems, in particular a problematic education system and counter-productive parenting.

In order to understand the diverging worlds of Tao Ran the doctor and Tao Hongkai the educator, we can refer to the experience of Mr. Keith Bakker as emblematic of the differences between these two opposing forces. In 2006 Keith Bakker was the first person in Europe to open up a “detox clinic” (in Amsterdam) for game addicts offering in-house treatment using essentially a biomedical model as his guiding method. Echoing the biomedical model outlined later, Bakker initially said: “Video games may look innocent, but they can be as addictive as gambling or drugs and just as hard to kick.”¹² At the end of 2008, however, Bakker had a major methodological and theoretical change of heart. “The more we work with these kids the less I believe we can call this addiction,” he told the BBC. “What many of these kids need,” continued Bakker, “are their parents and their school teachers – this is a social problem.” While starting out thinking “game addiction” was an individual pathology, Bakker is now of the view that the gaming problem “is a result of the society we live in today.” In particular, Bakker has observed that 80 percent of the young people his clinic has seen have been bullied at school and feel isolated. Therefore, he (like Tao Hongkai) believes many of the symptoms they have can be solved by going back to “good old-fashioned communication.”¹³ Echoing Bakker’s findings, Tao Ran has actually observed the same troubled social existence of his own “patients.” In direct contradiction to his diagnostic-based psychiatric model, as we will see, he has said the fol...