Twenty-four-year-old Li Jun sits where he sits most nights of the week, in front of a computer in his local Internet cafe in the east of the Chinese capital, playing ‘World of Warcraft’.
It is past midnight on a typical Monday night, yet almost every computer in the Internet cafe he sits in is in use. That is no small feat given that hundreds of computers are crammed into the small, second-floor space, and that industrial fans are needed to keep the patrons cool – as well as to clear the smoke that comes from the many, many lit cigarettes around.
Every night, this scene is played out in thousands of Internet bars in hundreds of cities across China – a country that had 384 million Internet users by the end of 2009, and where this number increases by 31.95 million users annually, according to a White Paper on the Internet released by the Chinese government in June.
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