About ten to fifteen years ago, “Internet addiction” was perceived to be a big problem among the youth in China. Kids would skip school and play video games in Internet cafes.

Someone opened an “Internet addiction treatment center”. Parents would pay to send their kids there, where they are deprived of their freedom, be indoctrinated about their “sins”, and even subject to electric shock. [1]

The state official television network, CCTV, aired a documentary endorsing the practice.

I am not making this up.

Obviously nobody cares about this anymore because literally everyone is an Internet addict.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Yongxin#Internet_addictio...

Can you expand on what you mean by "everyone is an internet addict"? I mean in the examples you gave, you mention the children skipped school - which is a problem. The article and some other commenters mention a nighttime gaming ban - which is a reaction to kids staying up at night to play video games. Clearly there IS a problem, and the Chinese government has this way of solving it.

In the west there's similar solutions. For game time, parents can use parental controls, time limits and bedtimes to set up phones and the like to not work at night. The government(s) are more concerned about gambling mechanics in games.

It's a problem of phrasing.

Back then, for an average person, there wasn't much to do on the Internet, except online games and chatting with friends, both of which are considered a waste of time. As a result, Internet itself was demonized, and Internet addiction was considered a problem, even a mental disorder.

Nowadays, China has a booming tech sector. Everyone is using the Internet all the time to browse TikTok videos, stream TV shows, order food delivery and shop deals. And people stopped talking about Internet addiction, because suddenly they realize they themselves fit the clinical definition, which was to be online for more than a few hours a day.

Well, it's a problem of phrasing, but the other issue is the CCP wants any reason to put facial recognition in people's homes. Since taking a sledgehammer to a social issue like children's screen-time will cause no appreciable backlash among anyone who can't be sent to a slave camp, they can kill two birds with one stone by harnessing gaming addiction to a total panopticon. You can already go to prison there for using your phone to access Playboy magazine or the NYT, so, why not. It's their casino, and if you don't like it, see how you like your kneecaps.

There isn't much a kid can do to not conform.

Beating up by your parents are pretty common in China, and nobody gives a flying f--k about what you do with you kids. People would praise you for deploying violence, because that shows you are a strict parent, and the level of willingness you would spend on 'rectifying' the behavior of your kids.

And the parents would always tell the kids the violence right now is good for them, with a kind of twisted logic that early age suffering would be made up with later success in your life.

So to many Chinese family, in China or in west, the kids are not treated as individuals, they are a form of property/investment of the whole family. The parents are willing to invest a ton of money in the kids' education, in exchange to greater control/say in shaping up the kids' future.

It is a different social contract all together, I don't personally like it, but I am thankful for my parents for paying up all my tuition all the way until graduate degree, then that is super expensive for them, so there is trade-off.

In all societies, people don't care what you do with your kids if you beat them up. But they care a lot what you do with your kids, if you teach your kids to question authority. When I grew up we were taught that police were basically stupid, pathetic authoritarians with no power, who needed to hold weapons to prove they had little dicks. We were taught that anyone who claimed to know something about "God" was a fraud. And we were taught never to say these things in public, because the government would put us in a foster home and Dad and Mom would get arrested.

[edit] We were also taught that marijuana and other drugs help you relax and be creative, that sex within a loving relationship is a good thing, that there's nothing wrong with pornography, that prostitution is an important outlet for sexually repressed men who would otherwise become violent, and that guns are for idiots who can't talk their way out of problems. All of these are still very dangerous views in most of the world.

Re-educate.

I think the GP comment meant, like, low-functioning autistic people. Not people who won’t conform; people who cannot. People who do not have the mental capacity to grasp and conform to social norms.

I don’t think China is sending such people to re-education camps. Those camps don’t have the infrastructure required to care for such people. They only really “work” as an oubliette for able-bodied/able-minded people that will understand and carry out orders when threatened with force.

(I’d believe you if you instead said they were e.g. having nursing staff at Chinese hospitals do secret state-sanctioned eugenic infanticides, to avoid having such people around in the first place. But allowing parents to invest a lot of resources into raising unable-to-conform children, just to then inevitably send those children [likely permanently] to re-education camps, seems wasteful.)

It would take me some time to dive into the prevalence of abusive “therapies” or what every day life is for autistic people in China. I did find this report about a rehabilitation center that forces autistic children to walk 19km (12 miles) per day as part of their treatment. It gained notoriety after a 3-year old died while in the center.

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/811/toddler-jia-jias-death-hi...

That does sound more like it. My point was that this type of pseudo-“rehabilitation” can’t really be conflated with pseudo-“re-education.” No matter how abusive these rehabilitation centres are, they still have staff and facilities that the POW-camp-like environment of a re-education facility doesn’t (and probably cost a lot more to run.)

Similar to the difference between state prisons and state mental asylums in America in the 1960s.

Because people who can't conform are a lot less dangerous than people who won't.

If a person is disabled (physically or mentally), they will be mostly confined by the family to their home for their own good and not participate in the wider society.

Do you think a totalitarian state makes that distinction? They are not known for their sensitivity. I would imagine they are simply dispensed with.

I wish I didn’t look this up.

Could you share what you wish you hadn't found?

The treatment of the Uyghur people was the first thing that popped up on google when I search “re-education China”

Considering what Muslims constantly do here in Europe, I applaud China for taking measures before things spiral out of control.

Hope EU will finally get their heads together and act as well before it's too late.

You need to check yourself. Being part Syrian, I have a lot of Muslim family and I find great offense to your support of genocide. A small number of Muslims are radical, no different than the radical Christians here in the US. Are all Christians deserving of being round up, put in camps, and all free will taken away?