Internet-addiction camps in spotlight after teen dies
By all accounts, Li Ao, an 18-year-old man in Anhui province, was well-behaved but for the fact that he had seemingly lost interest in everything except the Internet, according to his mother.
So when Liu Dongmei read about an Internet addiction treatment center in Fuyang city and the success stories it touted, she was hopeful it would help her son. This center promised gentler approaches, such as physical activity and psychological counseling, instead of the extreme treatments for which some of China’s other Internet addiction “boot camps” have gained notoriety.
On Aug. 3, Liu and her husband checked their son into the center. They had agreed to pay nearly $3,500, so Li Ao could stay for 180 days.
Two days later, they received a phone call. Li Ao had been taken to the hospital, where he died.
Several days after his death, the distraught parents appeared on Anhui Television to describe what had happened to their son — and the shocking discovery they made when they saw his body at the mortuary: scars and bruises over his torso, arms and legs.
“His entire body was bruised,” Liu told AHTV, weeping uncontrollably.
Li Ao’s father sat stone-faced on the edge of the bed during the interview, clutching a single tissue.
“It hadn’t even been 48 hours since we dropped him off,” Li Tao told the news station. “After a day and a half, our child was gone.”
Chinese media outlets have said that the Fuyang center has been shut down while authorities investigate how the teenager died, according to BBC News. But Li Ao’s death is the latest high-profile incident involving Chinese Internet addiction “boot camps” and the controversial measures some have taken to try to break teenagers’ Internet habits.
In 2009, a 15-year-old in Guangxi province died two days after checking into an Internet addiction center, having been beaten by his trainers, according to the South China Morning Post. In 2014, a 19-year-old girl named Guo Lingling died at a center in Henan province after suffering head and neck injuries; her “training” had consisted of being repeatedly picked up, dropped and kicked on the ground, the newspaper reported.
In 2008, China formally declared “Internet addiction” a clinical disorder. “China’s Web Junkies,” a 2014 short documentary published by the New York Times, went into the Daxing Internet Addiction Treatment Center and found staff there using militarystyle tactics to treat the uniform-clad “patients.”
Amy B. Wang is a Washington Post writer.