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| Overuse has to be a concern of the whole "village". (Photo Source) |
Here's Reuters reporter Helen Coster doing a good job in localising the news of China's video rules:
Raleigh Smith Duttweiler was folding laundry in her Ohio home, her three children playing the video game Minecraft upstairs, when she heard an NPR story about new rules in China that forbid teenagers and children under age 18 from playing video games for more than three hours a week.
"Oh, that's an idea," Duttweiler ... recalls thinking. "My American gut instinct: This is sort of an infringement on rights and you don't get to tell us what to do inside of our own homes.
"On the other hand, it's not particularly good for kids to play as much as even my own children play. And I do think it would be a lot easier to turn it off if it wasn't just arguing with Mommy, but actually saying 'Well, the police said so.'"
Chinese authorities have labelled as "spiritual opium" the overuse of video games, and by association social media, and they have highlighted how these are an addiction entrapping a growing number of young people. Coster reports:
China's regulator said the new rules were a response to growing concern that games affected the physical and mental health of children, a fear echoed by parents and experts in the United States.
One such expert is "Paul Morgan, a father of two teenagers and Penn State professor who studies electronic device use." He is quoted as saying: "These electronic devices are ubiquitous. It's really hard to get kids away from them." Though he believes young people with disabilities could benefit from the social interactions provided by video games...
Morgan says negative associations with screen time are particularly evident for heavy users, possibly due to displacing activities like exercise or sleep. [However,] the ban doesn't address social media use, which is thought to be especially harmful for girls.
Another parent is also in favour of controls being implemented as a way of supporting parents:
Shira Weiss, a New Jersey-based publicist for technology clients including a video game company, sees value in the games that help keep her twin 12-year-old sons connected to their peers, but wants to better limit how often they play the more violent games.
"I think the Chinese rules are good," Weiss said. "You're still saying 'Play video games,' but you're just setting limits." She added, partially joking: "Can they come here and impose that restriction on my house?"
In China, too, parents showed support for the new rules. Li Tong is a hotel manager in Beijing with a 14-year old daughter. In one of a series of Reuters articles used here,* he is reported as saying:
"My daughter is glued to her phone after dinner every day for one to two hours and it's difficult for me or her mother to stop her. We told her it's bad for her eyes and it's a waste of her time, but she won't listen."
Some details about the rules:
The new rules place the onus on implementation on the gaming industry and are not laws per se that would punish individuals for infractions. Kids can often circumvent rules that require the use of their real names and national identification numbers when signing into games by using the login details of adult family members.
They limit under-18s to playing for one hour a day - 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. - on only Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, according to the Xinhua state news agency. They can also play for an hour, at the same time, on public holidays.
The rules from the National Press and Publication Administration regulator coincide with a broader clampdown against China's tech giants, such as Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings.
The campaign to prevent what state media has described as the "savage growth" of some companies has wiped tens of billions of dollars off shares traded at home and abroad.
What worries the business sector is the long-term consequences of an interruption in the habit-forming pattern of game-playing that companies rely on for their spectacular profits, à la cigarette companies:
While the hit to gaming stocks was relatively measured as children do not provide much revenue for gaming companies, analysts noted that the implications for the long-term growth of the industry were much more severe.
"The root of the problem here is not the immediate revenue impact," said Mio Kato, an analyst who publishes on SmartKarma. "The problem is that this move destroys the entire habit-forming nature of playing games at an early age."
There was also relief that the regulations did not go further.
"What the industry is really afraid of is if the government stops approving new games like they did in 2018," said a Beijing-based private equity investor, referring to a nine-month period when China suspended approvals of new video game titles as part of an overhaul of the regulatory bodies that oversee the sector.
However, we saw how Coster's article quotes Ohio mother Smith Duttweiler in drawing attention to what would be expected as a typical American response to the Chinese rule-setting, namely, that it is an infringement of personal - and business - rights.
On those lines, Coster cites another American parent:
Michael Gural-Maiello, who works in business development at an engineering firm and has an 11-year-old son, believes parents should be the ones regulating their children's video game use. "I don't think governments really have a place in telling parents how their children should be spending their time."
But if the source of the problem that pits children against parents is something that is truly addictive, then parents need support from society as a whole in combatting that overwhelming attraction. Parents are not able to cope; therefore, government has a role to play in preserving the well-being of its young people.
Notice that the Chinese rules force gaming companies to act; it is not the government as such intruding into homes.
Authorities in China, the world's largest video games market, have worried for years about addiction to gaming and the internet among young people, setting up clinics which combine therapy and military drills for those with so-called "gaming disorders".
About 62.5% of Chinese minors often play games online, and 13.2% of underage mobile game users play mobile games for more than two hours a day on weekdays, according to state media.
Chinese regulators have also targeted the [fee-gouging] private tutoring industry and what they see as celebrity worship in recent weeks, citing the need to ensure the wellbeing of children.
Yes, "to ensure the well-being of children" first should come parents' exerting their status, lost since the days of "no-rules" parenting starting in the 1960s and 70s, the status of being guardians of the psychic as well as physical health of their children. That status involves the exercise of God-given authority, which young people have to learn to submit to, even if the rest of society is telling them that they have a "right" to do what they want, parents be damned!
That struggle within the home has to be a "whole village" effort if children, and therefore the whole of society, are not to be crippled by the various forms of dis-ease we see all around us.
What we see happening in China this week is not a sudden impulse. Rather it is part of ongoing engagement of the government in trying to recruit business conglomerates in acting for the common good:
In 2017, Tencent Holdings said it would limit play time for some young users of its flagship mobile game "Honor of Kings", a response to complaints from parents and teachers that children were becoming addicted.
A year later, citing concerns over growing rates of myopia, Beijing said it was looking at potential measures to restrict game play by children and suspended video game approvals for nine months.
In 2019, it passed laws limiting minors to less than 1.5 hours of online games on weekdays and three hours on weekends, with no game playing allowed between 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. It also limited how much minors could spend on virtual gaming items each month, with maximum amounts ranging from US$28 to $57, depending on the age.
In addition, minors were required to use their real names and national identification numbers when they logged on to play and companies like Tencent and NetEase (9999.HK), set up systems to identify minors.
In July, Tencent rolled out a facial recognition function dubbed "midnight patrol" that parents can switch on to prevent children from using adult logins to get around the government curfew.
There is no question that the behaviour of banks, other financial institutions and CEOs of major corporations has generated much anger at the most visceral level. After all, gut instinct is what drives our feelings of justice as fairness. But that behaviour is the logical consequence of the individualism that has been our substitute for morality since the 1960s: the ‘I’ that takes precedence over the ‘We’. How could we reject the claims of traditional morality in every other sphere of life and yet expect them to prevail in the heat of the marketplace? Was that not the point of the famous speech delivered by the actor Michael Douglas in the film Wall Street that ‘Greed – for lack of a better word – is good’? Greed ‘captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit’, he said: it marks ‘the upward surge of mankind’.
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| Markets don't distribute rewards fairly |
In a world where the market rules and its operation is driven by greed, people come to believe that their worth is measured by what you earn or can afford and not by qualities of character like honesty, integrity and service to others. Politics itself, because it can assume no shared morality among its citizens, ceases to be about vision, aspiration and the common good and becomes instead transactional, managerial, a kind of consumer product: vote for the party that gives you more of what you want for a lower price in taxes. You discover that politicians are claiming unwarranted expenses or getting paid for access: in short that politics has come to be seen as a business like any other, and not an entirely reputable one. That is when young people no longer get involved. Why should they? If all that matters is money, they can make more of it elsewhere.
However, Sacks is not advocating the overthrow of the free market system. But he is saying that when the morality that made the markets work, involving trust and confidence and faith in people and their words and signed documents, is neglected, "something significant is going wrong". He explains:
The market economy has generated more real wealth, eliminated more poverty and liberated more human creativity than any other economic system. The fault is not with the market itself, but with the idea that the market alone is all we need. Markets do not guarantee equity, responsibility or integrity. They can maximise short-term gain at the cost of long-term sustainability. They cannot be relied upon to distribute rewards fairly. They cannot guarantee honesty. When confronted with flagrant self-interest, they combine the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. Markets need morals, and morals are not made by markets.
They are made by schools, the media, custom, tradition, religious leaders, moral role models and the influence of people. But when religion loses its voice and the media worship success, when right and wrong become relativised and all talk of morality is condemned as ‘judgemental’, when people lose all sense of honour and shame and there is nothing they will not do if they can get away with it, no regulation will save us. People will continually outwit the regulators, as they did by the so-called ‘securitisation’ of risk that meant no one knew who owed what to whom.
Markets were made to serve us; we were not made to serve markets. Economics needs ethics. Markets do not survive by market forces alone. They depend on respect for the people affected by our decisions. Lose that and we will lose not just money and jobs but something more significant still: freedom, trust and decency, the things that have a value, not a price.
Parents, business leaders and investors, politicians, the media, that is the community as a whole, have a grand task ahead of us to protect our young people and so serve the common good.
* Reuters articles used can be found here, here, here and here
**Jonathan Sacks, 2020, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, Hodder & Stoughton/Hachette, London and New York.
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