Their Own Personal Brand of a Hero?

Due to recent researches the amount of internet-users in China arouse up to 348 million people. And by the way, Chinese netizens are the youngest users in the world.

Nowadays the segment of Chinese internet users includes more that 115 million people till the age of 19. It makes one third (or 33.5 % share point from the total number of web users in China). Such data is supposed to be real after a survey among 11-18-years-old schoolchildren from 9 provinces, autonomous regions and cities under the general centralized headquarters of China.

According to results of Chinese government researches, internet has a great influence on rising generation, moreover, nearly 14% of Chinese netizens are considered to be net-addicted.

But why do Chinese teenagers get addicted so easily? Probably, this is caused by great stress, lying upon schoolchildren or by bad life conditions, because due to statistics, the number of net-addicts in economically undeveloped towns is much higher than in prosperous cities. For example, in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou the rate of addicts is 8,1%, 8,7% and 8,3%, but in Guiyang, Yinchuan, Lhasa it is much higher, making 31,8%, 20,5% and 13,7%. Besides that, to great diligence and devotion, Chinese people working and studying also have a reverse side –high level of psychological "stickability”.

Interestingly enough, unlike so-called “basement dwellers”, the vast majority of Chinese teenagers don’t use their PC to connect to the internet, but visit specialized Internet cafes, where they can pay 5 yuans and spend all night playing on-line games (by the way, more than half of all netizens spend their time playing). They forget about everything in the world, playing for hours and sometimes, even for days. In 2007 a sad accident happened in Guangzhou, when 30 years old man was hospitalized right from the internet bar, where he had spent his last three days, playing non-stop on-line games, he died the same day in hospital.

Internet addiction and, especially, on-line gaming addiction becomes a real problem for Chinese society. On the 8-th of November Beijing Health Ministry adopted a law, which made from China the first country classifying the internet addiction as a clinical diagnosis. While the existence of internet addiction is still being debated in other countries, Chinese medics consider it to be as harmful, as alcohol and drug addictions are. They even stated a list of alarming symptoms. So, if you spend up to 6 hours a day on-line, suffer from insomnia, lack of attention, easily get irritated, crave for re-connection to the internet, then you are obviously suffering from Internet overuse. It means you are ill and need special treatment. And they will treat you – with hard exercises, diets and electroshock therapy as a treatment.

In 2007 year special clinics were set up all over the China. Parents paid a big money ($1300 per month) to get their children hospitalized. In such clinics youngsters lived in total isolation from the outside, under strict army-like rules. Those, who dared to break the rules, where punished (and treated) by electroshock therapy.

After hundreds of complaints from children who were tortured and death of Deng Senshan, 16-years-old-boy, who was beaten to death the very day he arrived to “deinternetization” clinic, the Health Ministry finally banned the use of electroshock therapy as a treatment.