Chinese 'Web addicts' get boot camp, therapy

A Beijing treatment base aims to wean kids off online games

Tao Ran, the founder of a youth rehabilitation center on a Beijing army base, has made it his mission to treat teenagers who are antisocial, doing poorly in school and are sometimes depressed.

Tao sends his "students" through a strict regimen of military drills, martial arts training, lectures and sessions with psychiatrists. Drill sergeants shout orders at the teenagers, most between 15 and 19 years old, as they march in military fatigues between activities.

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But the cardinal rule for these troubled youth: no Internet. For three months, the usual length of stay.

It is Internet addiction, Tao says, that has sparked the barrage of psychological symptoms and family problems for his patients.

While experts debate whether Internet obsession is a diagnosable condition, centers like Tao's have launched programs to wean young people off of online activities that they say can lead to compulsive behavior.

"Besides eating and sleeping, these students spend each day entirely on the Internet," Tao said in an interview. "They don't even shower or wash their clothes."

Tao's patients start each day with a 6:20 a.m. wake-up call and morning exercises. They file back to the center's eight-to-a-room, bunk-bed dorms for lights-out at 9:30 p.m.

Online games are the main culprit in most Web addiction cases Tao handles. World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike rank beside Chinese role-playing games as those that hook the most patients, Tao said. Online chat programs more often hook girls, who make up a handful of Tao's current 70 patients, he said.

Parents force most of the teens to come to the center in Beijing's southern suburbs. Many are tricked into coming, sometimes in the middle of the night.

Unwelcome pressure from parents pushes many of Tao's patients toward Internet obsession, he said. That pressure is often to perform well in school. Chinese students face intense competition for acceptance to top schools as early as at the primary level. High school students often spend several grinding months preparing for China's two-day college admission test, the sole measure used by the government to determine the future of their education.

So parents must attend Tao's program as well. They must communicate better and criticize less to help pull their children back from the virtual world, Tao said. Parents attend psychiatrist sessions, basketball games, debates and other activities with their children.

Treatment of compulsive Internet use has been done more openly in China than in many other countries, said Dr. David Greenfield, director of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction in West Hartford, Connecticut.

The condition is particularly common in Asian countries including South Korea, but China appears among the hardest hit because of its huge number of Internet users, Greenfield said.

"China is leading in showing how bad this could get," he said. "Because of the sheer amount of numbers, they're sort of showing worst-case scenarios."

Among Chinese youth online, nearly one in 10 is addicted to the Internet, according to a government-sanctioned report published this year. Most of those youth also suffer from poor relations with their parents, peers and teachers, according to the report.

About one-third of China's 300 million Internet users were under 20 years old at the end of last year, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

Internet addiction has not been formally labeled a pathology in either China or the U.S. But Greenfield argues that there is growing consensus and expects some kind of recognition in the U.S. in the next two years.