According to Liu, online entertainment benefits young people in five major ways. The interaction of online entertainment encourages an awareness of participating in social affairs; it enhances young people’s thinking ability; online life enriches their experiences in dealing with real interpersonal relations; cyber entertainment relieves the stresses of daily life and it enables them to learn things in an easy and entertaining way.

Liu’s argument is supported by the Research Report on Internet Entertainment Trends of China’s Youth, which shows that 52 percent of the respondents believe that online entertainment is more positive than negative.

In addressing the popularity of online entertainment, Liu said the primary reason is that China’s young people are not being provided with sufficient entertainment facilities. The leisure and entertainment channels are too limited for them.

In developed countries like the United States, youth leisure and entertainment facilities are pervasive. Even in some supermarkets, special sections have been opened in which children can read or play, Liu said. In addition, communities in Western countries are well developed and can provide diverse establishments and entertainment activities for the young people living there.

“The Internet itself has the magic to allure youngsters. There are many forms of entertainment available on the Net, which are quite novel and different from traditional entertainment modes. Thus, the Internet can easily hold the attention of young people,” Liu said.

Is it addictive?

Two major charges have been lodged against the Internet ever since the country’s youth became involved: It provides false or harmful information and it is addictive.

In response, Liu said, “Harmful information, such as pornography and violence, has been around long before the Internet was born. Without the Internet, youngsters will come into contact with such information in other ways. So the point is not to blindly blame the Net for providing bad content for the youth and to keep them away from the Net, but to focus on how to regulate the Net and make good use of it.”

Internet addiction, mostly resulting from playing online games, is claimed to be the largest problem threatening the healthy growth and development of Chinese youth. Statistics from the 2005 China Youth Internet Addiction Research Report show that 13.2 percent of young Chinese netizens suffer from Internet addiction disorder, and another 13 percent have the tendency to become addicted to the Internet.

Fang Ning, a research fellow with the Politics Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, opposes Internet entertainment. He holds that online entertainment is nothing than Internet “opium,” and he calls on young people to abandon their computer screens and get out Internet cafes to seek real entertainment in the real world.

However, Liu argued that there is not necessarily a connection between Internet addiction and Internet entertainment. In general, online entertainment activities of youths are healthy, he said. Though there have been a few cases of young people committing suicide due to addiction to online games, compared with the large number of gamers (estimated to be 20 million in China), the number of tragedies is very small.

Liu said online entertainment should not be held responsible for such unfortunate events, but rather individual weakness should be blamed.

China’s youngsters lack training in thinking, which the current educational system has failed to cultivate, Liu complained, adding many of today’s youths don’t know “how to see things in a dialectic and scientific way.” Therefore, he said, some of them are likely to go to extremes.

China needs to build more public leisure and entertainment facilities and offer more social activities to distract young people from the Internet, Liu said. The Internet addiction problem in Western countries is not as serious as in China because youngsters there are provided with various channels to have fun, he added.

Nevertheless, one thing about online entertainment worries Liu. The too-easy access to all kinds of information via the Internet is likely to lead young people to neglect to develop their own creativity. Once they are used to the convenient downloading, copying and imitating offered by the Internet, will their creativities be diminished?