19
votes
China cuts amount of time minors can spend playing online video games to three hours a week, with an hour extra during holidays
Link information
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- Published
- Aug 30 2021
- Word count
- 214 words
This was posted on reddit. Make of it what you will.
This summer there were reports of Tencent working on face recognition to ensure that people who log in to play online games are who they say they are.
A quick google search will get you results of varying quality. (I can't find the article I remember reading that I thought was good. Will edit this comment if I find it later)
Interestingly, a lot of this is seemingly about online games, implying offline games aren't as drastically affected or not affected at all. Perhaps the Chinese government (also) finds it too difficult to control online voice chats and to remove dissent against itself or it's practices as opposed to this being purely paternalistic ideology or authoritarian anti-insomnia measures?
If that were the case, why only impose the limit to minors?
Due to the console ban that only recently ended, I suspect online games are far more popular.
Chinese game servers are generally garden walled, and the censors are good at removing information from Weibo and WeChat, so gamechats shouldn’t be an issue.
I've seen this story all over the place and it reminds me a lot of the social credit story from a few years ago in that it was made out to be a much bigger deal in western media. As I've mentioned before, I lived in China for a few years and that experience really opened my eyes to the anti-Chinese sentiment that we are constantly exposed to through western media. I reached out to some of my Chinese friends to see what they thought about this new policy and their takes were pretty similar to the reddit post linked above. One person likened it to piracy laws in the US.
China is far from a perfect place but if you only knew of it from the things we see in the media (or on tildes for that matter) you would think of it as a terrifying country that is the greatest threat to global stability. It's clearly having an effect on how Americans see the country and that really scares me.
I think one of the great conundrums of living in a western democracy is figuring out what to do with your indignation about evils and injustices in places that aren't western democracies.
I can summon a passionate rage about Taliban rule in Afghanistan, or abusive CCP policies in China, or atrocities in Venezuela, Russia, North Korea, the Philippines, or untold other places I don't live in. At the same time, I know it would be a colossal and counterproductive waste of life and resources to expect my country to aggressively "fix" any of it. History has shown the outcome of foreign invasion, occupation, nation-building, regime change, endless war, blowback, etc. And we have far too many of our own unresolved problems to earn the right to credibly police the world anyway.
Still though. The governments of the world aren't getting any more virtuous over time. Certainly not when left to their own devices. What do you do with that? How do we steer this planet toward a brighter future for everyone on it, irrespective of the political borders they live within?
I think the idea of needing to "fix" these places is a uniquely western/American one and it is deeply misguided (I'm not sure if you are American, but when I say 'we' that's who I'm talking about). Who is calling on us for help? What nation wants a group of foreigners who know nothing about the local culture to come in and meddle in social/political affairs? Take some of the problems in America, for example. I wish I could see something done about things like climate change, the corruption that led to the 08 financial crisis, or reproductive rights in the south, but I would hate it if the Chinese or Russians got involved.
At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves what issues deserve our attention. If you ask me, we should focus on getting our shit together. "Secure your mask before assisting others." Here are just a few of the problems America is facing right now: the west is on fire due to unchecked climate change and drought, the gulf coast just got pummeled by another hurricane, 1200-1500 people are dying of covid each day but actively resist the solution because of misinformation, and the biggest story this week is about how we ended a 20-year occupation that left a country in complete shambles and people are making the case for us to turn around and go back. Let's not forget that we recently had one of our two major political parties claim our last election was fraudulent, and in 2020 nationwide protests against racism and police brutality were met with, well, racism and police brutality. It takes a special kind of arrogance to think we should involve ourselves in the domestic affairs of other countries, or that we should be focused on anything other than our own issues (to be clear, I am not accusing you of being arrogant). Imagine how people would react if we kept the same headlines from the past 50 years but replaced any mention of the US/America with China. We're not the good guys. Given the United States' militarism and long history of imperialism and unjust wars of aggression across the world, we should be highly skeptical of anything that aims to paint a foreign adversary as evil or dangerous because it is most likely being used to drum up support for military intervention.
I think the only thing we can and should do is take care of our own issues and hope to serve as an example for other countries. There are countries in the EU that do this for the US all the time when it comes to things like education, health care, parental leave, or infrastructure. It's not the most effective by any means, but I'd much rather stick with solving these issues internally than have a bunch of Danes show up with tanks, telling us how to build our railway network. If we fix things on our end, we can be the same kind of beacon for things like democracy and freedom of speech. If we continue to approach China the way we do now with all our disfunction and hostility it will only strengthen the CCP.