An update on how Xi Jinping is launching new tools of social control and attitude-shaping
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China's fresh restrictions reek of paranoia
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- The story: China’s new regulations on how much time minors can spend playing online video games took effect, restricting young people to just three specific hours per week: between 8 and 9 p.m. on Fridays, weekends, and holidays. 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)
- Worried by video games: These have always 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. The government had reconciled with the financial possibilities of the video game market, opening space for Chinese gaming while maintaining controls over content.
- Crackdown on celebrities: The new restrictions are now a part of a crackdown on celebrity culture and entertainment that is framed in clearly ideological. As a nationalist Li Guangman said in his essay, China needed a “profound revolution. Capital 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 also called the United States as the main enemy, suggesting it is waging a multisector war against the country—including “biological warfare”.
- Ideology all the way: Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rule is charaterised by ramping up of ideological paranoias. The video games and fan clubs are seen as a dangerous opportunity for foreign division, that split Chinese society. 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.
- China is largely liberal on LGBT issues, and the public has 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 state homophobia.
- China's definition of healthy youth now is: studious, straight, and nationalistic. China may soon crack down on the lives of college students and a new round of compulsory militaristic exercises for high schoolers.
- More restrictions on ethnic minorities: A statement from Xi Jinping that the Chinese Communist Party’s “supremacy over ethnic work must be upheld” and minorities’ “sense of identity and national pride” boosted likely signals more repressive measures to come, ranging in intensity from the atrocities in Xinjiang to the attempts at abolishing Mongolian-language education that caused mass protests in 2020. China’s original ethnic policy, borrowed from the Soviet Union, saw the brutal repression of supposed separatists and the betrayal of ethnic minority communist leaders who were promised independence or meaningful autonomy. They were allowed the space for cultural and linguistic preservation—something that has disappeared fast. The reassertion a month ago of Mandarin-language education in Inner Mongolia is a particularly strong signal. Not only were Mongolians a seen as model minority, but the scale of last 2020's protests also would likely have caused a rethink of the policy in the pre-Xi era.
- Celebrity Zhao Wei wiped out: Famous actress Zhao Wei, one of China’s most famous, has had much of her online presence vanish, with content removed from social media, her name scrubbed from TV and film credits, and some of her shows and films taken down from streaming services. A now-deleted post on her Instagram account denied that she had fled to France. The couple were big investors in Alibaba, the technology giant that became one of the first targets of the recent regulatory crackdown. Zhao and her husband Huang have ties in Hangzhou, Alibaba’s hometown, where a political purge began recently. Such disappearances were a regular part of life in the Soviet Union, but they are particularly surreal in an era of internet celebrity.
- EXAM QUESTIONS: (1) Explain the Xi Jinping philosophy of maintaining social control. (2) Why does the Chinese Communist Party engage in micro level control on citizens' lives? Explain.
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