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Why does China's government hate video games so much? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lemuria@lemmy.ml to c/gaming@lemmy.ml

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I saw a post here (https://lemmy.ml/post/1179679) about some Chinese kid spending USD 64k on video games and I read the news article and found myself down a rabbit hole.

https://www.techspot.com/news/98980-13-year-old-spent-64000-parents-money-mobile.html

China has long held a dim view of video games, calling them "electronic drugs" a few years ago. It only allows those under 18 to play online games for one hour, between 8 pm and 9 pm local time, on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays.

So basicaly, this article says that China (or more accurately the Chinese government) has a dim view of video games.

So I kept digging and found this article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/business/media/china-online-games.html

“I think this is the right policy,” she said. “It amounts to the state taking care of our kids for us.”

This phrase just screams "BAD PARENT" to me.

Why do you have to offload the responsibility of caring for your children to the government? You chose to bring them into the world, now you're responsible for them.

Which brings me to my question... why does China's government hate video games so much? Why would they want to impose such draconian restrictions on childrens' free time?

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[–] piezoelectron@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

This is a common misconception, but fully understandable one. If you look into political theory, one of the first things you discover is that all governments -- whether they call themselves "democratic" or not -- are, before anything else, at war with the people they claim to represent.

The "people" -- not rival foreign states -- are the first group against which a state of at war with, whether the state in question is a monarchy, a republic, a dictatorship, a plutocracy or something else.