Taken at 2 a.m. to an 'Internet Addiction' Camp, a 31-Year-Old Woman Is Now Suing
Fu Jing was taken from her bedroom in Hubei at 2 a.m. and driven to a Chongqing 'internet-addiction treatment' center her father had paid 46,500 yuan to fix her 'lying flat'. After 159 days and a beating, she is suing — and the camp's defense in court this week was that the beating was done 'as a job duty'.
The men arrived at 2 a.m. on October 14 last year at an apartment in Xiangyang, Hubei. Fu Jing, then 31, refused to open the door — so, by her account to China News Weekly, they pried open her window, took her from her bedroom, and drove her overnight to a "youth growth practice center" in Jiangjin, on Chongqing's outskirts. She was an office clerk who spent her evenings working part-time as an online-game companion. Her father had decided the habit meant she was addicted to the internet, and had paid the center 46,500 yuan in tuition and travel to correct it.
The center, Fumiao, advertised itself as specializing in "behavior correction and internet-addiction treatment". Its consultants told the father they could fix behaviors including "not eating meals on time" and "lying flat" — the slang for opting out of the rat race that has become a generational slogan. For four months afterwards, the only window he had into his daughter's life was photographs teachers posted in a parents' group chat. "In the photos she always looked blank," he told the magazine.
Fu spent 159 days inside. In February, she says, an instructor beat her after she refused to eat a cold meal; a forensic assessment graded the injuries as "minor harm", the lowest category that still counts as a crime. She went on hunger strikes to try to get out. Several former students have separately accused the center of illegal detention and corporal punishment, according to China News Weekly's earlier reporting, which also notes the facility's operators did not respond to calls.
What makes the case unusual is not the alleged abuse but who is suing: an adult, taken from her own home by her own father's arrangement, now demanding 99,900 yuan from the camp and joint liability from the instructor who beat her. At the October 10 hearing in Jiangjin District People's Court, the defense acknowledged the beating — arguing it was performed "as a job duty" — and the company's lawyer proposed cutting damages to 15,000 yuan. No verdict came that day. Police have opened a criminal case against the instructor. Fu, for her part, has blocked her father on messaging apps and moved out.
The story has traveled well beyond Chongqing — it sat high on Baidu's trending board this week, and the magazine's write-up drew thousands of likes on Weibo — because it touches a set of anxieties that have been converging for years: parents with the money and the authority to commit grown children to unregulated "correction" facilities, a gig-economy side job read as pathology, and an industry that has survived scandal after scandal. The court will rule on the 99,900 yuan in due course; the criminal case against the instructor is the one to watch.