No computers allowed for the weekend

Morning Post. November 27, 2009

The top headline on today’s Morning Post (北京晨报) concerns neighborhood volunteer teams that are going to go around this weekend and “fine” people using their computers to go on the Internet. Their reasoning? Trying to promote the “moderate use of the Internet.” Journalist Dong Zheng (董正) reports:

From 6 o’clock tonight, an alliance made up of many website administrators will make their websites go blank, some will have advertising banners and others creative ideas to remind people to shut down their computers over the weekend. They are also calling the websites of different communities to add the slogan: “No computers over the weekend” and “Use the Internet moderately” at the bottom of their sites. At the same time, web users who responded to the event will change their QQ and MSN status as “No computers over the weekend for 63 hours.”

The instigator of the event, Mr. Guan Shaobo (关少波) of Mosh.cn (魔时网) said, “Blank Screen Weekend” will be held over three days, community websites such as Tiantongyuan (天通苑) community website, and Bato.cn (八通网) have already joined us. People who “break the rules” have to be careful over the weekend: “Apart from being ‘blank screened,’ ‘NC63’ will also carry out mysterious offline activities.” From what Shaobo revealed to us, this weekend there be a “NC63 search team with invisible police dogs.” Therefore anyone who wants to use the Internet should be careful this weekend, because when the time comes there will be dozens of people who have responded to the event, and the NC63 volunteers, who have dramatic skills and dare of play, will use invisible “police dogs” on invisible dog leashes to go inside the city’s cafes “in search” of computer users in groups of seven.

Once they discover that some web users are using their computers over the weekend, they will give then a “NC63 fine slip,” and will, for evidence, take a picture of the computer with the slip on it. The slip itself will be an introduction to NC63, and they will use good intentions influence Internet usage.

Actually, “NC63” activities has been in the past more “radical.” Some volunteers decided to rush into a cafe, Internet cafe, and randomly shut off someone’s PC or laptop computer. When they considered that these actions might risk Internet user’s own “radical” reactions, and that they shouldn’t let publicity for a public welfare event affect other people’s normal lives and work, they changed to using the “fine slip” instead.

Guan Shaobo has said that the activity is to use egao to tell people that “‘virtual’ reality can be more fun that being virtual on the Internet!” As for whether this would upset people using the Internet, he explained that he will worry a little, but he will try to take charge of the situation as much as possible, so that no-one is made unhappy. “I will try my best to convince web users, and let them know my good intentions about how they can use the Internet moderately. I believe that I will earn their understanding and support.”

On Wednesday this week the same paper reported that 800 stray cats had been found in Tianjin (天津). As a result, cat lovers and volunteers had gotten into a scrabble with the “cat dealer.” In today’s Morning Post, there is a follow-up report on the fates of the now estimated 690 cats. The article concentrates on the legal battle between the “friends of cats” and the police and the dealer: the police seem to be allied with the dealer, and knows what’s going on with the “cat dealing.”