Parents whose children have reached adulthood are outsourcing coercion to private institutions
Originally published on Global Voices
Young adults are forced to do physical exercise inside a behavior correction facility. Screenshot from BBC Chinese's YouTube Channel.
On a Sunday morning in March, a 21-year-old music student arrived at an apartment complex in Beijing to teach a piano lesson — a side job she did to earn money to fund her studies. Her father, her aunt, and two employees of a private disciplinary institution were waiting for her.
Her relatives claimed that the strangers were police officers investigating a family member. They forced her into a van, confiscated her phone, and drove her hundreds of miles away to a closed institution in Henan province, China, supposedly for “internet addiction rehabilitation.”
She remained there for 11 days.
Her internet use had little to do with her confinement. According to an investigation by Southern People Weekly, her parents disapproved of her boyfriend and believed their previously obedient daughter had stopped listening to them. They paid the institution to isolate her, control her daily life, and pressure her to end the relationship. Public reporting indicates that this institution charged 26,800 yuan (USD 3,970) for six months or CNY 36,800 (USD 5,451) for a year, including room and board.
Staff told her that she could leave after she had forgotten her boyfriend. She was legally an adult and fully independent at the time.
Her case is part of a wider pattern.
A marketplace of control
A July 2026 investigation by China Newsweek documented several adults placed in similar institutions by their families. A 21-year-old shop worker said employees restrained him and transported him hundreds of miles after his parents paid them to correct his sleeping habits. A 25-year-old woman living alone said three people entered her home, seized her phone, and took her from Jiangxi to a disciplinary school in Hubei.
In another case, an institution advised a mother to lure her 26-year-old son to Chongqing by promising him a vacation. He spent 82 days inside the facility.
Several former detainees later reported the institutions for unlawful detention or restriction of personal liberty. Their complaints did not result in criminal cases.
For many readers outside China, “internet addiction” camps feel like a remnant of the early 2000s. These institutions became notorious for military drills, physical punishment, forced confinement, and electroshock treatment during this time. In 2009, China’s Ministry of Health ordered medical institutions to stop using electrical stimulation to treat internet addiction, citing insufficient evidence of its safety and effectiveness.
The industry survived the public backlash. It changed its messaging and continued operating.
Today, “internet addiction” functions as a flexible label for behavior families reject. It can encompass gaming, romantic relationships, unconventional employment, irregular sleeping hours, and resistance to parental demands.
While internet addiction is not recognized under the International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision (ICD-11), the global benchmark for mental health diagnoses, China has recognized internet addiction as a clinical issue since 2008. This official terminology allows families to justify their actions. A disagreement becomes a disorder. Parental disapproval becomes a concern. Confinement becomes treatment.
Some institutions now call themselves specialized training schools, family education centers, behavioral-correction programs, psychological counseling centers, or youth-development organizations. These labels give forced confinement and coercive practices the guise of education and care.
The basic transaction remains clear. Families pay private organizations to discipline children they consider unmanageable.
The industry now applies this model to adults.
A gap in enforcement
Parents have no general legal authority over adult children who possess full civil capacity. They cannot legally decide where those adult children live, whom they date, what work they pursue, or how they organize their daily lives. However, emotional pressure, financial dependence, and family obligation can preserve parental influence, even where legal control has ended.
Private disciplinary institutions offer families a way to override that boundary.
The institutions provide transportation, surveillance, confinement, isolation, forced routines, and psychological pressure. They confiscate phones, restrict movement, control communication, and demand obedience. Parents purchase forms of control they can no longer lawfully impose themselves.
These institutions extend parental authority beyond its legal endpoint. They turn coercion into a commercial service.
The recent cases also reveal an enforcement gap.
Article 238 of China’s Criminal Law prohibits unlawfully detaining another person or otherwise depriving them of personal liberty.
In the case of the Beijing music student, police issued a written non-filing notice stating that there were “no criminal facts,” and that they would not be pursuing a case. The published reporting discloses no further reasoning. It does not explain how police assessed the family’s false identification of institution employees as police officers, the abduction and transport of an adult, the confiscation of her phone, or her eleven-day forced confinement.
The notice records a conclusion while leaving the central legal question unanswered: Why wasn’t her report enough to establish grounds for a criminal investigation?
Other cases reveal fragments of the reasoning used in practice. One parent was reportedly told that the placement counted as voluntary because the family had authorized it. Other complaints stalled over jurisdiction and difficulties preserving evidence. These explanations center the parents’ decision and leave the adult detainee’s lack of consent unresolved.
Confinement as protection
A separate investigation by Jiemian News in June 2026 found adults as old as 33 inside such institutions and reported that, at one location, adults and minors were present in almost equal numbers.
There is no official count for how many adults have been forced into such facilities, or of how many facilities exist throughout the country. One Chongqing institution was reported to have nearly 100 adults as of late June 2026. These institutions are scattered across cities and provinces throughout China, meaning there could be hundreds — if not thousands — of adults held against their will because their family disagrees with their life choices.
Parents describe confinement as protection. Institutions present it as education, counseling, or behavioral intervention. Police encounter families who insist that they are acting in their adult child’s best interests.
The confined person may have no phone, no access to independent legal assistance, and no opportunity to contradict the family’s account. Both investigations describe institutions using controlled recordings to shape the account presented to families or police. Detainees were asked to say that they were safe, grateful to their parents, or ready to end the relationships their families opposed.
Familial language softens the appearance of coercion. Conduct that would immediately raise alarm between strangers can be treated as a private disagreement when organized by a parent.
This response allows private institutions to operate between educational services and unlawful deprivation of liberty.
The institutions also rely on vague definitions of “misconduct” that can warrant people’s detention. The recent cases involved a romantic relationship, irregular sleeping hours, so-called excessive gaming, work habits, unemployment, and career choices that parents considered improper. None required a clear medical diagnosis.
In effect, this industry sells families the power to suspend adulthood. For a fee, they provide transportation, isolation, surveillance, forced routines, and obedience under the language of education.
Their continued existence reflects more than a regulatory failure. It also exposes the persistence of a family ideal in which parental authority is expected to outlast adulthood, and obedience remains a moral obligation rather than a legal choice.
As long as that expectation continues to blur the boundary between parental concern and personal liberty, there will be a market for companies willing to sell control over adults who are legally free.
