In Confucianism, the relationship between a father and a son, a superior and their subordinate, a state and its citizen are considered equal. Therefore it is considered normal for the state to be paternalistic. Also, collective responsibility takes precedence over individual freedom. Each person is supposed to conform to its role in society. Children’s role is to study, rather than play video games all night.
Together, you get a video game ban, enforced by the full power of the state.
Until a few years ago, video game consoles are banned in China for the exact same reason.
Someone opened an “Internet addiction treatment center”. Parents would pay to send their kids there, where they are deprived of their freedom, be indoctrinated about their “sins”, and even subject to electric shock. [1]
The state official television network, CCTV, aired a documentary endorsing the practice.
I am not making this up.
Obviously nobody cares about this anymore because literally everyone is an Internet addict.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Yongxin#Internet_addictio...
In the west there's similar solutions. For game time, parents can use parental controls, time limits and bedtimes to set up phones and the like to not work at night. The government(s) are more concerned about gambling mechanics in games.
Back then, for an average person, there wasn't much to do on the Internet, except online games and chatting with friends, both of which are considered a waste of time. As a result, Internet itself was demonized, and Internet addiction was considered a problem, even a mental disorder.
Nowadays, China has a booming tech sector. Everyone is using the Internet all the time to browse TikTok videos, stream TV shows, order food delivery and shop deals. And people stopped talking about Internet addiction, because suddenly they realize they themselves fit the clinical definition, which was to be online for more than a few hours a day.
Beating up by your parents are pretty common in China, and nobody gives a flying f--k about what you do with you kids. People would praise you for deploying violence, because that shows you are a strict parent, and the level of willingness you would spend on 'rectifying' the behavior of your kids.
And the parents would always tell the kids the violence right now is good for them, with a kind of twisted logic that early age suffering would be made up with later success in your life.
So to many Chinese family, in China or in west, the kids are not treated as individuals, they are a form of property/investment of the whole family. The parents are willing to invest a ton of money in the kids' education, in exchange to greater control/say in shaping up the kids' future.
It is a different social contract all together, I don't personally like it, but I am thankful for my parents for paying up all my tuition all the way until graduate degree, then that is super expensive for them, so there is trade-off.
[edit] We were also taught that marijuana and other drugs help you relax and be creative, that sex within a loving relationship is a good thing, that there's nothing wrong with pornography, that prostitution is an important outlet for sexually repressed men who would otherwise become violent, and that guns are for idiots who can't talk their way out of problems. All of these are still very dangerous views in most of the world.
I don’t think China is sending such people to re-education camps. Those camps don’t have the infrastructure required to care for such people. They only really “work” as an oubliette for able-bodied/able-minded people that will understand and carry out orders when threatened with force.
(I’d believe you if you instead said they were e.g. having nursing staff at Chinese hospitals do secret state-sanctioned eugenic infanticides, to avoid having such people around in the first place. But allowing parents to invest a lot of resources into raising unable-to-conform children, just to then inevitably send those children [likely permanently] to re-education camps, seems wasteful.)
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/811/toddler-jia-jias-death-hi...
Similar to the difference between state prisons and state mental asylums in America in the 1960s.
Hope EU will finally get their heads together and act as well before it's too late.
First time I realized I was playing my PSP, gameBoy and PlayStation2/3 games illegally
You can read my post history; I'm anything but a Chinese Nationalist and Xi lover. Still, I don't think this law is crazy.
It clearly serves a purpose of protecting children from harm. The enforcement is creepy, but as a law I don't see it as any different to the laws about parents supplying alcohol to minors in Australia.
This is without even getting into a discussion about government monitoring citizens through cameras in their homes. That is quite literally the premise of 1984. Well I should take that back, the premise was the gov could watch you at any time, not that they actively are.
I wasn't referring to the cameras (" The enforcement is creepy"...), but it does make sense why a government would want to pass laws limiting gaming/screen use late at night amongst teenagers.
I went through it as a teenager and the lack of sleep causes all kinds of mental health and behavioural issues.
I'd argue the fact that CCP solves problems at the source is exactly the reason China didn't crack when people thought it would.
That particular link is not causitive, but correlative. Very little of education causes productivity.
Is it simply power? What is the point of it?
You cannot crime or human behavior to misbehave.
I wonder how long it will be until China's citizens start to crack under the pressure.