The new regulation that came into force at the end of August 2021, drastically limiting the time spent on video games as decided by the Chinese government, is aimed at young minors, who must feel it particularly keenly, like a bitter echo of the famous pages of A. de Tocqueville: that “above these there stands an immense and tutelary power, which alone takes charge of securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, provident and mild”.
The measure is not new, since from 2019 online playing time for minors was limited to 1.5 hours per week (3 hours at weekends), with a ban on playing between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. This measure, judged too lax by the Chinese government, has therefore been replaced by a new, more authoritarian regulation aimed at forbidding children and teenagers to play for more than three hours a week. These three hours of play “freedom” are nevertheless confined to Friday, Saturday and Sunday between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., at one hour per day; the exercise of Chinese power remains as “detailed and regular” as ever, but this time it is exercised with a little more harshness.
The “mental opium” that video games represent (according to the description of an official daily newspaper) must therefore be framed and limited. And this, with the aim of freeing up time for young people in order to protect them better. Protecting them especially from so-called “addiction” problems. Let us recall here that China opened video game detox centres as early as the 2000s and has nearly 110 million players under 18.
Faced with this problem of video game overconsumption pointed out by the authorities, the internet giant Tencent had nevertheless tried, a few months before the Chinese State legislated, to propose a “digital lock” for the youngest players. This was clearly not enough for the government, which also extended its minors protection law to social networks. Indeed, the social network Douyin (called TikTok in its international version) has also been forced to limit the usage time of its users under 14 to 40 minutes a day (between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.).
Faced with the algorithms in these entertainment tools that aim to capture ever more of their users’ attention time in order to monetise it (advertising, “free-to-play” video game model), we can consider that these government measures, though paternalistic with a touch of despotism, turn out to be beneficial, in particular when they aim to protect the younger generation, increasingly struggling with excessive consumption of digital tools.
This is where we can question the reason that drives the Chinese government to legislate on the subject – it could content itself with appealing to parental responsibility and running prevention campaigns. The answer to this question appears fairly obvious: to control the free time of Chinese youth, the “target” affected by these limitations.
But this control is exercised neither on offline video games, nor on social networks (except for the youngest users of the Douyin network), nor on screen time in general. It is exercised squarely on online video games.
Consequently, it is probably less “addiction” to video games than the interaction of players in an intangible virtual world that the Chinese authorities seem to fear most.
For in these communities created by online games, as S. Tisseron points out: “players of course fight each other, but they also develop common strategies, and sometimes they talk about other things. About their private lives, even about society”.
Let us recall that adolescence is a particular moment in human development: each generation (re)invents its era in so far as “adults know how to do things, but teenagers don’t listen to them, do things their own way, and sometimes innovate”.
By limiting online video game time, this is precisely what the Chinese State, which champions the notion of stability as the paradigm for the exercise of its power, seeks to limit by controlling these young players: the “collaborative thinking” of a youth which, by definition, seeks instability in order to create and invent the future society in which it will live as adults.
As S. Tisseron sums it up: “one hour a day is enough time for players of network games to fight enemies, alone or with friends, in dedicated spaces. But it is not enough to feel like talking about life and what is possible”.
“The last, and surely not the least, characteristic feature of a civilisation (…) is the way in which human relationships are regulated”. Needless to say, the Chinese authorities do not take this feature lightly, when we know that the whole of the Chinese internet is subject to permanent and general surveillance, by means of algorithms but also through thousands of “little hands” ensuring the conformity of every message published. In addition to the measures limiting playing time, this veritable digital panopticon, under the guise of protecting young people, more probably serves to control them: “it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born”.
But this overlooks the creative capacity of the new generation, which is a master in the art of reinvention, particularly when it comes to diverting a digital tool from its original purpose to invent a new use for it. To take just one prototypical example, we can cite the social network Douyin/TikTok, on which young users divert the tool, under the guise of a “make-up tutorial”, to get political messages across. Likewise, although this cannot be quantified, many minors get around the rules limiting online video game time by impersonating adults, thus seeking to escape from a framework that has become a straitjacket.
As everyone knows, the stick is not the reed, and the less flexible it is, the more likely it is to break.
Julia Leleux
Bibliography
Books
• FREUD, S., Malaise dans la civilisation. Paris : Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 2010.
• TOCQUEVILLE, A. De la Démocratie en Amérique, vol. II, Paris : Flammarion, 1993.
Articles
• MOGHADDAM, F. (2021). Limite du temps de jeux vidéo en Chine : une mesure de santé publique très politique. In “Actualités” France Culture. https://www.franceculture.fr/numerique/limite-du-temps-de-jeux-video-en-chine-une-mesure-de-sante-publique-tres-politique
• SIX, N. (2021). La Chine limite le temps d’utilisation de TikTok à 40 minutes par jour chez les moins de 14 ans. In “Pixels” Le Monde. https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2021/09/20/la-chine-limite-le-temps-d-utilisation-de-tiktok-a-40-minutes-par-jour-chez-les-moins-de-14-ans_6095345_4408996.html
• TISSERON, S. (2021). En limitant le temps de jeux vidéo en ligne pour les mineurs, le gouvernement chinois fait un pari risqué. In “Débats” Le Monde. https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2021/10/01/serge-tisseron-en-limitant-le-temps-de-jeux-video-en-ligne-pour-les-mineurs-le-gouvernement-chinois-fait-un-pari-risque_6096674_3232.html
