Inside the secretive world of Chinese internet addiction camps where teens are beaten, tied up and plied with drugs to ‘cure’ their obsession with computer games
Around 80 young patients are treated at Beijing's military-like China Young Mental Development Base - and even drugged by their parents to get there
IT WAS mid-afternoon when the drill sergeant’s patience with the teenage boys finally snapped, and he landed the punch.
He clenched his fist and made a hard, thudding strike to the chest of a gangly lad who had been giggling at Beijing's China Young Mental Development Base, one of China’s notorious ‘internet addiction rehab centres’.
Around 80 patients, the majority of which were male with an average age of about 16 to 17, were consigned to the prison-like centre by their parents in an attempt to cure them of their digital obsessions.
These centres have caused uproar for alleged violence and for locking up patients, who are often removed from school against their will and sometimes drugged to get them in the facilities.
My visit was in 2015, and what I saw painted a similarly bleak picture of life in these controversial places.
Before I saw the punch, which was punishment for larking about during one of the military-style exercises patients are forced to do, I heard how the same drill sergeant tied up misbehaving patients.
And shortly before that Tao Ran, the centre’s boss and a concrete-tough former People’s Liberation Army colonel, told me that the venue had been operating since 2003.
Five years after it opened, in 2008, China became the first country to recognise internet addiction disorder (IAD) as a mental illness.
The Chinese government estimates that around 24 million people in the country suffer from IAD, many of them teenagers addicted to playing online games such as League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients.
And an estimated 300 Chinese internet addiction centres have sprung up to treat them.
Earlier this month, two years after my visit to the Beijing centre, one of them made headlines that shocked the country.
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Eighteen-year-old Li Ao died after spending less than two days in the Hefei Zhengneng Education facility, an internet addiction centre in China’s eastern Anhui province.
His body showed evidence of multiple injuries, both internal and external.
His mother, who has the surname Liu, told the Anhui Shangbao newspaper: "My son's body was completely covered with scars, from top to toe. When I sent my son to the centre he was still fine, how could he have died within 48 hours?"
There have been no reported patient deaths at the China Young Mental Development Base, but my day there suggested that violence is the norm at facilities like it.
I asked for an accurate patient experience, so after walking inside the centre’s prison-like walls I was stripped of any device that would allow me access to the internet. Or, as Tao described it, “electric heroin”.
Tao chuckled as he told me that the site, featuring a concrete courtyard with ping pong and basketball facilities, used to be a computer school.
High walls surrounded the site, which patients were forbidden to leave. They slept eight to a room in bunk beds, locked up every night in a bare wing of the main building.
As I pulled on a camouflage-patterned T-shirt, I was told that they were forced to dress like soldiers, and as well as military-style training had to attend lectures about how evil the internet is.
They had counselling sessions with visiting parents, and many received drug treatment for mental health disorders.
Tao said that many patients suffered from depression, one reason why he had mental health assessments performed on all new patients.
This involved an electroencephalography (EEC) brain test to search for physical markers associated with mental illness.
When it was my turn for the test many of the patients, flitting in and out of their dormitory rooms, laughed as a rubber hat dotted with electrodes and wires was snapped onto my head by a nurse. (The test did not suggest that I had depression, phew.)
The atmosphere became less jovial when I asked some of them how they were treated in the centre.
The intimidating drill sergeant watched them like a hawk as they spoke to me, but despite the supervision one patient’s brief comment gave a harrowing glimpse into how authoritarian the place was.
He claimed that soon after entering the centre he was punished for quarrelling with staff about not being allowed to phone his mother.
“The drillmaster tied my hands and feet in order to let me calm down… for several minutes,” he said.
Another patient, whispering out of earshot of the supervisors, called the centre a “brainwash”.
Later in the day I saw violence first-hand - the aforementioned punch in the courtyard, which came after a marching exercise.
The patients were lined up in precise rows, but one of them started laughing. The drill sergeant grappled with him before landing the single blow, prompting the patient to hurriedly fall back into line.
Following this, and after I was scolded once more for having “unauthorised” conversations with other patients, it became clear that I had seen things the centre’s bosses did not want being made public.
The drill sergeant locked me in a room for an hour, lecturing me about what I could reveal about the centre. After an hour or so he gave up, undid the lock and let me walk free.
If the drill sergeant was happy to punch patients in front of me, what went on when journalists weren’t present?
Tao conceded that a culture of violence was common in the centre – but claimed that it was some of the patients who were the violent ones, rather than the staff.
He said that some of the patients “smash glass with their fists, so I have to place polymethyl methacrylate [a shatter-resistant glass alternative] in fear of them getting hurt… you’ll find dents on the doors and desks, and the bathroom is seldom safe and sound.”
He added that one female former patient beat the nurses. Some patients were forced into the centre by parents “holding their arms all the way”, he claimed, and at least two had been drugged by their families so they wouldn’t put up a fight on entry.
Noting the often-tempestuous relationships between patients and their families, Tao claimed that “58 per cent of the kids [in the centre] beat their parents”.
He also claimed “85 to 95 per cent” success rate for treatment, although this has not been verified.
High success rate or not, China Young Mental Development Base’s methods fed into the fearsome reputation these centres have as a whole. It’s little surprise that many Chinese social media users have been calling for their closure recently.
The death of Li poured more petrol on the fiery debate about these centres. He isn’t the only patient to not make it out of one of these places alive.
Last month a 16 year-old boy committed suicide at a centre in the northern city of Xi’an, by jumping from the fifth floor of a building.
In September 2016 a 16 year-old girl from Heilongjiang province in northeast China killed her mother, seemingly during an act of grisly revenge for sending her to one of the centres.
The girl, who was not named by Chinese media, spent four months in an internet addiction centre in Shandong province, over 1,500km away from her hometown.
She reportedly hated the experience so much that on her return she tied her mother to a chair, where she starved to death.
The daughter claimed she had been abducted and sent to the centre against her will. She said that patients were beaten and humiliated, writing in a blog post: “People point at my nose and call me unfilial and worse than a beast… it was them who cursed me and beat me, it was them who sabotaged my life.”
Many people are hoping that the centres’ days are numbered. The Chinese government does seem to be losing patience with them.
In January China’s State Council drafted a new law that, if passed, will ban the centres from using any violence against patients, or threatening them.
If my experience was anything to go by, that would mean something of an overhaul for the treatment methods at the China Young Mental Development Base, and other places like it.
Previously, we told you about a mum who revealed how her pre-teen boy plays games online for up to 10 hours A DAY.
We also brought you news of how a 19-year-old was so addicted to online gaming his feet started to ROT after a six day binge.