China’s internet cafes can’t make money unless they break the law

If you’re an internet cafe owner in China, you’ve probably had a rough couple of years. As more and more of China’s adults get connected via their smartphones and personal PCs, interest in internet cafes is down. Between 2011 and 2012, for example, 10,000 internet cafes in China shut down. And things haven’t improved since.

That’s what Hainan internet cafe owner Mr. Zhang told a newspaper reporter in a recent story about the difficulty of operating an internet cafe these days. Business is much worse than ten years ago when he first started, Zhang said. And what’s keeping him and many other Chinese internet cafes afloat is illegal. Said Zhang:

These days business is bad for every internet cafe. If you don’t let kids in to play games, then basically you can’t make any money at all.

That’s a controversial statement because legally speaking, internet cafes are not supposed to admit minors. They are required to register the real identity of everyone who goes online, but Zhang said there are plenty of ways around that. You can simply swipe the same ID card for multiple computers, for example, or download IDs from the internet and register them.

See: A disgusting fact about internet cafes in China (and probably everywhere else)

Zhang said that he used to follow the regulations himself, but his business started dying, and he was forced to follow the example of other local netcafes, turning a blind eye as kids came in – even during school hours – to surf the web and play games. He knows he’s probably hurting the educations of some children, he said, “but I do it for the sake of surviving; there’s nothing else I can do except [allow kids in].” And even when kids come in during school hours to play, he says he can’t chase them off:

You can’t offend the students who come frequently. They’re connected to all of their classmates, so if you try to restrict one of them, a lot of other ‘business’ will disappear along with that one.

But even as owners like Zhang break the law, China’s government continues to attempt to keep kids out of internet cafes via new regulations. The latest measures include a number of revised regulations and a brand new one: no internet cafes will be allowed within 200 meters of primary, middle, and high schools.

A quick peek at Google Maps revealed that this may lead to the shutdown of a couple of internet cafes, but probably won’t have much effect on whether or not kids can get to internet cafes. One elementary school in Harbin I checked, for example, had just a couple internet cafes within 200 meters but at least 11 within 500 meters, which is still just a couple minutes’ walk away:

More or less everyone agrees that the current situation isn’t great for kids, but a decade of regulation clearly hasn’t worked. In the end, it may be that China’s internet cafes will be outdone by a growing middle class that can afford smartphones for their kids and computers at home for gaming. But especially in less-developed areas, those days are still a long way off. For now, minors are likely to remain the top customers at China’s internet cafes, despite the fact that they’re not supposed to be there.

This post China’s internet cafes can’t make money unless they break the law appeared first on Tech in Asia.

China’s internet cafes can’t make money unless they break the law