By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Feb 26 2001 (IPS)

Nearly 50 percent of all teenage cyber- surfers in the Chinese capital browse the Internet for study purposes, while the other half indulge in on-line games, chat sessions and even pornographic websites, official sources show.

Some youngsters say they go to Internet bars to enjoy what they are interested in, and escape from the supervision of their parents and teachers.

The revelation of these figures and behaviour by Xu Xi’an, director of Beijing Education Commission at the ongoing fourth session of the 11th Beijing Municipal People’s Congress, aroused heated arguments among delegates here.

Zhang Rongfang, a local teacher, proposed that Beijing should clamp down on all Internet bars to protect youngsters from any “unhealthy” effects.

But others affirmed that the convenient and abundant Internet information sources play positive roles in developing youngsters’ intelligence and widening their horizons.

It is the government’s obligation to guide students’ interests in healthy directions, and laws and regulations are also necessary to supervise the booming Internet business, said Xu.

Statistics show that by the end of 2000, Internet surfers in Beijing numbered more than 4 million, accounting for 30 percent of the capital’s permanent residents.

Beijing has issued special regulations, requiring all Internet bar managers to be censored by police bureaus. However, only eight bars have been authorised so far.

Many Chinese parents are agonising over whether to buy computers for their children, because they know many use the Internet mainly for on-line chatting and games.

A headmaster of a middle school in Beijing said 30 to 40 percent of his students spent at least five hours a day using computers.

A survey in the southern city of Guangzhou showed 88 percent of teenagers spend 100 yuan (12 U.S. dollars) a month on Internet use, mostly for socialising. Some use the Net for studying.

But reports also said students addicted to the Net did poorly in their studies. Many were often too busy dreaming of e-puppy love or a sex-related website.

“If I had known this beforehand, I wouldn’t have bought the computer,” one parent told the Beijing-based ‘Life Times’.

A father said he often supervised his child’s surfing the Internet to keep him away from unhealthy information.

But teenagers continue to be wowed by the vast reserve of information on the Internet and the choices they have while on it.

Thirty-one percent of teenagers considered it cool to lie in chat rooms, for instance. A quarter thought “you can do anything you want on the Internet,” according to a survey by the Chinese newspaper ‘People’s Daily’.

Chinese net surfers, especially teenagers and young people in their 20s, are hooked on on-line dating. Logging onto online chatrooms or using ICQ, an online paging service, surfers can meet and converse with partners on-line, in the hope of finding friends or a spouse.

Some, like a woman net surfer called Jiejie, met her American husband Mark, in a chatroom.

Jiejie recalls that she was a loner in college at Shanghai, timid and withdrawn because she was ashamed of scars on her neck, the remnants of a childhood accident. She turned to the Internet for consolation and friendship.

After a couple of days chatting online, Jiejie and Mark decided to meet in person. Mark flew to Shanghai to meet her and a couple of months later, they got married.

But a recent survey by a Shanghai-based lifestyle website found that only 7 percent of on-line lovers end up married. Often such relationships are seen as just a laugh, a game or a hoax.

Earlier in February, a 14-year-old Hong Kong schoolgirl was raped in a karaoke box by her boyfriend whom she had met recently through a chatroom.

A ‘Guangzhou Daily’ report said that an increasing number of young girls under 18 years old have been raped or suffered sexual harassment by boyfriends they had just met.

Perceptions of human equality on the Internet also lead youngsters to worship hackers as “knowledge heroes.” Twenty-two percent of teenagers thought hackers were “able persons” and 8 percent considered them “network Robin Hoods,” said the newspaper report.

Another problem, experts said, was that children who spend too much time using computers would quit communicating with people around them and become isolated from the off-line world. This trend has also been reported by experts in other countries.

Some local experts say addiction to the Internet may not help what has apparently been growing incidences of psychological problems among the youth.

Parents and website operators should take responsibility to spare teenagers from addiction which “may cause more problems in the future,” China Teenager Research Centre expert Meng Yunxiao was quoted as saying in the ‘China Youth Daily’ newspaper.

Tan Jianfeng, an expert from the No 215 People’s Liberation Army Hospital, said China now has some 16 million patients with psychological problems, one-third of whom witnessed the first symptoms during their childhood or puberty.

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