The ill effects of “opium for the spirit”: a critical cultural analysis of China's Internet addiction moral panic

The Relationship Between Personality Traits, Psychopathological Symptoms, and Problematic Internet Use: A Complex Mediation Model (Preprint)

“…While this was expected in the clinical sample, the similar prevalence among those recruited from internet cafes was non-evident at the first sight. However, internet cafés have a special position in Chinese internet culture (see: [54][55][56][57]). In general, young people (mostly males, under the age of 30 years) play online games, chat online, watch movies.…”

Affecting relations: domesticating the internet in a south-western Chinese town

“…These views conformed to a wider public discourse that exists in China regarding the dangers of the internet, which has already been well documented by various scholars (Herold, 2011, p. 8;Qiu, 2009, p. 240). Most notably this national discourse revolves around fears that internet use can become addictive and have damaging effects on young people's educational performance and morality (Golub & Lingley, 2008;Szablewicz, 2010).…”

Cultures of the Internet: Identity, community and mental health

“…(In response to a series of investigative reports on the deaths of several young people, legislation was passed in 2009 outlawing electroshock therapy in such facilities in China [Stone, 2009]). Some social scientists have interpreted the obsession with online games as a response to the intense familial pressures to achieve high grades experienced by many young people in China today (Bax, 2011), while others have argued that the moralizing and pathologizing media and expert discourses around Internet addiction in China represent a means of state-fostered social control (Manjikian, 2012), a site for the negotiation of shifting ''moral relations in contemporary Chinese society'' (Golub & Lingley, 2008, p. 72;Szablewicz, 2010), and a focus for anxieties about the neo-colonial cultural effects of the Internet-crystallized in talk about online games as ''electronic opium'' (Golub & Lingley, 2008, p. 64). Such studies have generally focused on media reports, and there is much work to be done in expanding their insights with survey studies like that of Yang and colleagues (2013) in this special issue, as well as finer grained ethnographic and interview-based research, drawing upon the rich literatures of cultural psychiatry and psychological anthropology.…”