China’s curb on video games will prove futile

Chinese president Xi Jinping. Picture: Getty Images

I want to start with a story I was told a few years ago by a middle-aged woman in the Albanian city of Gjirokaster. Elira had grown up in a country ruled over by the Communist Party and its distinctly cult-of-the-personality leader, Enver Hoxha. No contact was allowed with the West and – China excepted – pretty little contact with the East.

The most valued consumer good an Albanian could own back in the 1970s was a television. People would save for years to buy one. But the single permitted model, the Illyria, came with its UHF decoder disabled. Only the state channel, available on VHF, was allowed; and in this way harmful and degenerate capitalist influences were kept at bay.

Yet at some point it had been discovered that a rudimentary UHF receiver could be created with the help of an aerial, some wire and a sardine tin. All over western Albania at night, TV owners such as Elira’s father would connect their tins, erect their temporary aerials and tune in to Italian television, where they would catch extremely harmful and degenerate pop music programmes. By morning the aerials had been folded up and put out of sight. Elira told me that a generation of Albanians had learnt Italian in this way.

China is limiting video game time for kids. Picture: Supplied

Three news items coming out of China this week made me wonder if President Xi Jinping knows this story. Hoxha’s Albania had, after all, been the only one of the eastern European countries to follow Mao when the Sino-Soviet split divided the communist world in the mid 1960s. Chinese bigwigs visited Tirana often.

One of our reports from Beijing concerned the announcement of a new policy, which came into effect yesterday, severely limiting the time that minors can spend playing online games. From now on if you’re under 18 you can only role-play in Honour of Kings or League of Legends on Fridays, weekends or school holidays for one hour between 8 and 9pm. To try to ensure that teenagers aren’t getting round the ban, companies have to register players using their real names. One huge online games company, Tencent, has already announced that it will be using facial recognition technology to police attempts to subvert the rules by impersonation.

This ban is just the latest and most draconian of a series of restrictions imposed by the Chinese government. From 2000 to 2015 games consoles were banned in China. In 2018 companies were stopped for nine months from issuing any new titles. And for the past couple of years kids’ online gaming has been restricted to 90 minutes a day and three hours on holidays. Clearly the authorities believe that this was far too permissive, hence the change.

One reason given by state-run media for the new action will be familiar to British readers: the fear of gaming “addiction”. Many teenagers, especially boys, spend a great deal of time playing these games and a few display the classic signs of addiction. But it’s hard to explain, with reference to this alone, why the existing restrictions needed to be tightened.

Visitors take photos of a banner illustrating a book by Chinese President Xi Jinping at a booth at the annual Hong Kong Book Fair. Picture: AFP

Well, there’s eyesight. A few years ago there was a sudden surge of alarm at figures showing a big rise in the instance of myopia among Chinese children. In fact this is an international phenomenon but it is worse in east Asia than in western Europe. There isn’t a medical consensus on what has caused it but Xi seemed to be convinced that online gaming was a factor, referring to it in several speeches.

You think that sounds an improbable motivation? One pattern of western response to such Chinese restrictions has been to see them as an attempt to rein in companies and billionaires who have become too big for comfort. Their capacity to exercise economic power (runs this argument) risks creating rivals to the ruling Communist Party. So moves such as this are best understood as part of a pragmatic struggle to preserve the party’s monopoly.

Such rationalisations are, in a way, comforting. But perhaps we should pay a bit more attention to what the Xi regime actually says. The games are not just addictive or bad for your eyes, according to official outlets, they also instil “incorrect values” and create “negative energy”. They are a form of cultural corruption that work like “poison” in the minds of the young.

Police walk past a Peppa Pig figure on a wall outside the Yu Yuan gardens, a popular tourist spot Shanghai. Picture: AFP

It’s worth considering the other stories coming from China this week. There was the attack on the cult of celebrity and “irrational fan culture”, which took the form of the removal of popularity charts of all named performers from the Weibo internet platform. At the same time the Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection was told that “capitalism” was seeking to “influence society’s thoughts” and undermine socialism, and that the Chinese nation was in danger of “losing its spiritual home”.

Finally, The Times reported yesterday the widespread republication by state media of an online article noting approvingly a “profound revolution . . . returning to the original mission of the Communist Party of China, returning to the people centralism and returning to the essence of socialism”.

All societies agonise over their young ones. The next generation’s departing from the norms and practices of their elders always causes anxiety. But in a revolutionary society, as China’s current, super-powerful president believes his to be, it is something more than that. Such a society exists to create the new, improved human being.

Such a view means that the party needs to help mould the better person. So if 85 million Chinese people, say, elect to be fans of a particular actress, it is up to the party to cure them of their mistaken allegiance. If parents wrongly think their teenagers can safely game for an hour every night, the party needs to correct them.

Students wear protective masks as they arrive for class on the first day of the new school year in Beijing. Picture: Getty Images

Meanwhile Xi will visit schools and comment to packed classrooms, “These children have a great spirit, and not many of them are wearing glasses. This is very important”. Pity the child with astigmatism.

But a truly insightful Xi might have consulted the Albanian experience or, if that was too obscure, recalled the maxim coined by the great American screenwriter William Goldman, talking about Hollywood. “NO ONE,” wrote Goldman in capital letters, “KNOWS ANYTHING.”

The film bigwigs could never really tell what the next big hit would be. Somehow the people – inchoate, word of mouth, one by one, group by group – would decide what pleased them, moved them, motivated them. And find their way to it.

The culture of a people, the longings of the next generation, can’t be decided by some cliche-repeating ideologue from the Central Committee. All that will happen, over time, is that the gulf of credibility between the government and the governed will become a chasm. And the harder the party bears down, the worse it will get. Till something gives.

The Times