China's internet detox boot camps have drawn wide condemnation for abusive treatment of children that includes beatings and electroshock therapy, prompting the government to draft a law that would crack down on the camps' worst excesses.
Experts welcomed the law, announced in China's state-controlled news media, as an initial step toward curbing scandals in the industry.
"It's a very important move for protecting young children," said Tao Ran, the director of the Internet Addiction Clinic at Beijing Military General Hospital. He said he had seen several Chinese teenagers return from boot camps that treat internet addiction showing signs of psychological trauma.
Figures on the number or growth of internet detox camps in China are scarce, but the camps' treatment methods have been generating controversy for years.
Among the more criticised camps is the Addiction Treatment Centre in the eastern province of Shandong, which is said to have treated more than 6000 internet addicts, mostly teenagers, with electroshock therapy since it opened in 2006. It made headlines last September after one of its teenage patients starved her mother to death in retribution for abuse she had purportedly suffered at the camp during a forced detox regime.
The draft law would ban abusive treatment such as medical and electroshock therapy in the camps, as well as "physical punishments", but it does not specify what those other punishments might include.
The legislation also would limit how much time each day that minors could play online games at home or in internet bars. Providers of the games would be obliged to take technical measures to monitor and restrict use, such as requiring players to register under their real names. The legislation does not yet specify the total number of hours allowed, but minors would be barred from playing online games –at home and elsewhere – between midnight and 8am.
Game providers and internet bars that failed to enforce the law would be subject to fines and possible closure by the government.
In 2009, the Chinese Health Ministry issued guidelines against using electroshock therapy for internet addicts. Trent Bax, the author of Youth and Internet Addiction in China, said he wondered whether a new ban would be any more effective.
Despite the Health Ministry's policy, "punitive practices continue to victimise China's youth" in internet detox camps, said Bax, an assistant professor of sociology at Ewha Womens University in Seoul, South Korea.
He said that scientific research indicated that a "harm reduction" approach, which holds that people learn best when they feel safe and respected, was more effective than a confrontational one in treating internet overuse.
Researchers from Chinese and German universities wrote in the journal Asia-Pacific Psychiatry in 2014 that the highest prevalence of "problematic internet use" worldwide had been observed in Asia. Christian Montag, the study's lead author, said in an email on Thursday that South Korea had the world's highest rate of problematic internet use, in part because of its large technology sector and online gaming market. South Korea also offers camps for internet addiction.
Reports in the Chinese news media this week said that lawmakers would accept public comments on the draft law until early February but gave no indication of when it might be put into practice.
Officials and psychologists have debated how to measure and regulate the problem of internet overuse. A crucial question, analysts say, is whether to classify the problem as a psychological disorder or as a symptom of underlying disorders.
In a sign of how fluid the debate is in China, the Health Ministry said in 2009 that it would no longer use the term "addiction" to describe how the internet harmed people who used it improperly or excessively.
But a study the same year by the China Youth Association for Network Development, which is led by a committee under the ruling Communist Party, found that more than 24 million Chinese people from the ages of 13 to 29 who used the internet were digital addicts.
New York Times