During a recent visit to a local Suzhou Starbucks I suffered a bit of cultural dislocation. Four local boys clad as any American lad in his energetic mid-teens would be dressed – baggy basketball shorts hanging off flat butts, down past the knees; tent-sized white T-shirts emblazoned with this or that brand name; boat-sized sneakers – were paired off at a couple laptop computers, buzzing with excitement. They had up on their screens websites displaying graphics – not pornography – and were in deep discussion about layout, color and general all round hip-ness. It was a scene like any other in an American suburb. I was deeply disturbed by the ordinariness of it all.

When one of their even younger friends came along – a bouncy, pretty girl looking to be about twelve years old, her hair bobbed short, her tennis skirt neat and pressed, her high tops as hip as any I had worn in my Keds days – the boys pretty much ignored her. Still, she pressed to see what the boys were all a-titter about as the four congregated around one of the laptops. They were tracking one of the boy’s QQ online-conversations, which they all seemed to find quite amusing. QQ is the most popular online instant messaging application in China, with hundreds of millions of users of its messaging service and website portal.

I thought then about the Green Dam initiative, which has the Chinese government attempting to mandate that software be placed on all computers sold in China after July 1st of this year that ostensibly blocks pornography and politically sensitive sites. Of course, such localized access to private and corporate computers implies a great deal of potential for misuse by a government that has made known its preferences for well-filtered information. Western corporations and Chinese citizens have been very vocal about their dislike of the directive.

And yet, in an evolving society in which parental supervision goes no further than ensuring a child studies up to twelve hours a day, there’s little awareness of or value placed on the sorts of parental control software that parents buy for the family computers in the West. Or even of a parents’ responsibility for policing their child’s habits in cyberspace. Besides which, most parents in China who can afford to buy computers for their children are themselves working upwards of twelve hours a day, six days a week so they afford the middle class way of life that’s opened up to them the last ten years. They have little time or energy left to themselves to police what their children surf on their computers.

Indeed, it seems China has just as much a challenge filtering out pornography and predators as the West does. The frequency of stories seems to be growing of unwary children and even young adults giving out personal details to sexual predators in QQ encounters, and of con men (and women) trapping the unwary in websites that convincingly dupe consumers. A Chinese friend is particularly annoyed with his sister, a single local woman in her twenties who seems to think nothing of passing on her phone number and address to head shots of men dressed in the same sort of white tuxedo men wear for wedding photos in China who profess they are actually single.

It’s these domestic cyber-roots of the perverse I think the government should be more concerned about than, for instance, censoring a loosely knit cult that performs a set of breathing exercises and shouts rude things at the powers that be. In the least, the government should be educating parents about all the new dangers lurking in their fast-modernizing society. Certainly, four thousand years of history never readied China for what awaits its net-savvy youth.

After all, if a society cannot protect its own children; then who will?