Chinese surf the Internet at a cybercafe in Beijing, June 3, 2009.
China has very specific rules for their internet cafe's. According to their official Internet policy, they must sign in the users, no minors are allowed, and they have specific rules down to no smoking signs being posted.
A recent article reported that China is drastically cutting down on their non-official internet cafe's. 7000 were closed in 2010. If these cafe's did not agree to new rules, regulations, and monitoring practices they were shut down. The largest of the new regulations was a smart chip ID that could track and monitor the users and what content they are viewing. "Rights activists say that while the government claims that the new regulations are in place to protect underage netizens from inappropriate and pornographic content, they are also used by the ruling Communist Party to limit content that Chinese netizens can view online."
The Ministry of Culture recently released their 2010 report on Internet use and it announced, "China had around 163 million Internet cafe users at the end of 2010, an increase of 21.1 percent compared with the previous year. But the overall market lost nearly 13 percent of its turnover following the new rules."
China also began implementing Internet cafe chains that are state run (imagine, that). In doing this it became much harder to start an independent internet cafe. Beyond this, the newest regulations became even stricter on the content regulation. "The government listed as forbidden any content that 'endangers state security, divulges state secrets, or subverts state power.' Any content that jeopardizes "ethnic unity," interferes with government religious policies, propagates "heretical or superstitious ideas," or "disrupts social stability" is also banned, according to the regulations governing China's Internet." These content regulations are very normal for the content regulations across the board in Chinese cultural products.
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