China Restricts Video Game Time
China’s new regulations on how much time minors can spend playing online video games took effect today, restricting young people to just three specific hours per week: between 8 and 9 p.m. on Fridays, weekends.
Companies are expected to enforce the regulations, and, as usual, firms such as Tencent have no choice but to endorse the state’s new impositions.
A previous law already limited online game time to 90 minutes per day on weekdays; the latest tightening reflects the state’s wider paranoia about losing control over young people.
Video games have long bothered both parents and the Chinese leadership. Between 2000 and 2014, China officially banned the sale and import of video game consoles, although they remained widely available. Some parents turned to so-called gaming addiction camps. But it seemed like the government had at last reconciled with the financial possibilities of the video game market, opening space for Chinese gaming while maintaining controls over content.
The new restrictions are part of a wider crackdown on celebrity culture and entertainment that is framed in clearly ideological terms—illustrated by a recent essay by a nationalist blogger that was republished by all major state media, including Xinhua and the People’s Daily. In the essay, Li Guangman calls for a “profound revolution.” “[C]apital markets will no longer be paradise for get-rich-quick capitalists, cultural markets will no longer be heaven for sissy-boy stars, and news and public opinion will no longer be in the position of worshipping Western culture,” he writes.
Li, an ex-editor for a minor trade publication, will likely slip back into obscurity. But the state sanctioning of his words raises concerns. The essay positions the United States as the main enemy, suggesting that it is raising a fifth column within China and waging a multisector war against the country—including “biological warfare,” a reference to the conspiracy theories China has pushed about the U.S. military being responsible for COVID-19.
The infiltration of Western ideas through culture and entertainment is an ongoing concern of the Chinese state—sometimes intensifying, sometimes diminished. Although it’s always been a part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rule, the recent moves indicate a ramping up of ideological paranoias. The video games and fan clubs are mostly not Western-made, but the form itself is seen as a dangerous opportunity for foreign division. A recent Global Times piece, for example, calls celebrity fan clubs “the target of overseas forces to split Chinese society.”
In recent years, Chinese state media has talked up a supposed masculinity crisis, linked to both fan culture and video game addiction. Young people, and especially boys, are seen as especially vulnerable to this influence and to becoming physically weak and unmasculine as a result. Likewise, the Li piece mentions “stamping out pretty-boy and sissy-boy tendencies in our national character”—in part a reference to influential pop stars such as Kris Wu, recently arrested on rape charges, who have long been the target of official tut-tutting.
Moreover, it is not just pop stars who have been singled out but also ordinary streamers perceived as gay. China is largely liberal on LGBT issues, and the public has successfully pushed back on censorship. But recent shutdowns of LGBTQ accounts, the blocking of related terms on some social media platforms, and demands at universities to record the numbers of LGBTQ students reflect an undercurrent of state homophobia.
The video game restrictions are a small part of this effort to create supposedly healthy youth: studious, straight, and nationalistic. The next step is likely to be a similar crackdown on the lives of college students and a new round of compulsory militaristic exercises for high schoolers.
Source: Foreign Policy’s China Brief
BDST: 0758 HRS, SEPT 2, 2021
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