New Internet Cafés banned in China

You can’t ban the internet, but apparently in a move to keep Chinese youth from spending too much time online, they have banned the opening of additional internet cafés. I learned this through my RSS feed from Webmaster World, but it is on Reuters.

I can testify to the popularity of internet cafés in China and Korea. Japan is a bit different I spent my share of time in cafés there. They are not as prevalent as in China and Korea. In Japan the keitai (cellphone) is all. The nicest café in Toyohashi was more popular for patrons to sit and read comics or magazines. People also came there to eat and drink fancy beverages and of course write SkyMail or meet friends.

The big users of internet cafés in Toyohashi seemed to have been foreigners. Now with the rise in popularity of laptops and WiFi maybe things have changed in Japan. But even in Vancouver it is the Koreans who set up internet cafés not the Japanese. Although all three are distinct cultures but in some ways the Chinese are more similar to the Koreans, though the Koreans themselves sought to emulate the rise of the Japanese economy as have many other nations.

Although the Japanese are big video gamers they are famous for consoles and standup games, these are popular in Korea and China, I know I had to come out of retirement and try the locals in Street Fighter 2 while I was in Beijing. Koreans and Chinese are perhaps bigger into online gaming, from Diablo to Starcraft to MMORPGs. These are not unpopular in Japan but in Korea, Starcraft is a national obsession, I remember at my guest house the Korean guys who ran it would watch Starcraft games being played on TV, to observe how the masters play. Although still dated there has never been a Starcraft II and Koreans continue to play it in PC Bangs. I think I even once got a keyword referral for something like “Korean starcraft chick“.

Chinese Internet in 2019

Having lived in China for the last four years, I can tell you everyone uses the Internet on their smartphones now. Also people are much more likely to have laptops or tablets than in 2007. The Internet is heavily censored in China even games, but people use VPNs to get around the Great Firewall when they can. A few companies dominate the Internet in China they include Baidu of course, but more and more Tencent and their app WeChat is how Chinese people access the Internet.

Reflecting back on my time in China

Yesterday when I should have been studying for the CQF, I updated an old blog post I wrote while a student in Beijing. I last visited Beijing in 2014. I did not use an Internet cafe but it was definitely necessary to use an internet cafe while I was a student at Tsinghua. Not only did the Internet go down, but sometimes the power went down either in your housing complex or the even the entire district of Wu Dao Kou. I remember walking to various cafes to see if their WiFi was working and yes eventually if you walk find enough you could sometimes find an Internet Cafe that still functioned.

Those days are long gone, China is probably the country that has changed the most in the last hundred or so years. Puyi was the last emperor of China, there is a movie about his life which I remember watching back in the 80s. He lived until 1967, but even since then China has changed a lot. Having maintained this blog for over twenty years, including having updated it and worked on the backend from Internet cafes in China and more recently over dodgy WiFi connections in cafes in Shanghai, I’m surprised when random old blog posts receive new visits, so I’m gradually taking time to update them.

If you have thought on how China or how the Chinese Internet has changed even since 2007 or if you want to compare or contrast the Internet cultures of Korea, Japan, or China or even another Asian country, I famously wrote from the Dead Fish cafe in Siem Reap many years ago, that text got slight improvements before I started my latest professional development course. I do monitor the comments and occasionally even the analytics, despite trying to be more professional in studying quantitative finance, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, Internet cafes are from a bygone era, but you can still comment on them below.

This entry was originaly posted on March 8th, 2007, it was last edited on June 28th, 2026 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Asia, Cafe, China.