War with the Internet Demon: Shock-and-awe of China's youth

This chapter seeks to contextualize and interpret a literally shocking incident which occurred in 'reforming' and 'modernizing' China. This incident can be posed as two questions: (1) How could Yang Yongxin, an unqualified and uncertified psychiatrist, working under the protective umbrella of a government-run hospital, misuse electroshock therapy on 3,000 adolescents as a 'cure' for an unrecognized psychiatric condition labelled 'Internet addiction'? (2) How could parents willingly take their beloved only child to this institution to be subjected to a punishmentbased illegal practice that international law would categorize as torture? The answer, I argue, is only partly to be to be found in the misuse of psychiatry and science. To unravel this mystery of using electroshocks as a form of punishment to deal with youth deviance requires travelling back to the ideology of Maoist political socialization. But first we need to journey retrospectively through the Bush administration's 'shock-and-awe' military doctrine, and then detour to recent cases in China involving shock-and-awe (e.g., Bo Xilai, Ai Weiwei, Chen Guangcheng). To help provide further explanatory power, Kafka and Orwell join this journey through the 'war with the Internet demon'.