The alleged negative effects of violent video games served as a topic in German elections many years ago. Now, the discussion about video games is also raging in China. And the tone is just as fierce. Video games are being shunned as “spiritual opium” and “dirty things”. Authorities are now taking action against gambling addiction and late-night gaming. Finn Mayer-Kuckuk explains how the gaming industry is becoming the newest target of the authorities in their fight for more compliance and ethics in business life. To prevent conflicts with state authorities, some companies are now taking proactive action.
Comac is also threatened by disputes. The aircraft manufacturer wants a piece of the pie and aims to compete with the top dogs Boeing and Airbus. Comac is about to receive certification of their first large passenger aircraft manufactured in China – the C919. Our team in Beijing reports on the rapid growth of the Chinese aircraft market. Although Chinese aircraft are not yet cutting edge, large orders from Chinese state-owned airlines are expected to provide the necessary sales. An unfair competition? Perhaps. But Boeing and Airbus also grew with the help of government subsidies – which ultimately led to a years-long trade dispute at the WTO.
I hope you enjoy our latest issue, and I wish you a pleasant weekend
China’s video games industry fears increasing pressure from the authorities. A series of comments in state media is seen by investors as a harbinger of a new slew of regulations aimed at the protection of youngsters from the potential dangers of mobile and online games. “Concerns grew as Covid restrictions kept more children indoors and
online,” writes analyst Ernan Cui of Gavekal-Dragonomics. “Further restrictions on underage gaming will likely materialize.” The government has already proven many times that it is not afraid to clash with its highly profitable industries.
Screen time has once again increased during the pandemic. The number of underage gamers playing more than two hours a day on their mobile phones increased from 12.5 to 13.2 percent in 2020. Even more children and teenagers now have online access. The revenue of the Chinese gaming industry amounts to 279 billion yuan (35 billion euros).
Tencent, the world market leader in mobile games, finds itself at the center of this discussion. The company’s tremendous success, especially on the domestic market, has led to young Chinese people spending more and more time and money on the game apps made by the company.
This week, Tencent has now more or less voluntarily limited the daily game time of its hit title “Honor of Kings” 王者荣耀. Teens are now only allowed to play for one hour on weekdays, then the app shuts down. Even on days off, only two hours are possible. Previously, the limit was one and a half and three hours respectively. Previous limits on in-app purchases remain in effect. The company even uses facial recognition to detect underage mobile users pretending to be older.
But with such actions in good faith, Tencent is unlikely to prevent further regulation by the government. Tellingly, state media proposed exempting the gaming industry from tax breaks for emerging tech firms. It is no longer an upcoming economic branch, but an established billion-dollar industry, argued the Securities Times. On the contrary, companies like Tencent should give back to society by paying higher taxes, they proposed.
Further amendments to the Youth Protection Act 未成年人保护法 are being discussed, with the most recent adjustment made as recently as June 1. Under Section 1C, a separate paragraph covers online games. It requires the industry to clearly identify players so that underage players cannot circumvent the restrictions. “Inappropriate applications or functions” should not be accessible to children and young people. The enabling of night-time gaming is prohibited. Smartphones are not allowed on school property without explicit permission from teachers.
The debate over the video game industry has already gone through several rounds. On Monday, state media had rallied against computer games through multiple commentaries published simultaneously, calling them “spiritual opium”: a serious attack, because opium has severe historic connotations in China. Prior to the Opium Wars, Britain had noticeably weakened China’s economic strength and overall vitality by supplying drugs on a large scale.
Now, Xinhua has identified a similarly dangerous enemy within. Online games are said to be as dangerous for the youth as “floods and wild beasts”. For the sake of sheer profit, game developers are ruining an entire generation, opinion-makers proclaimed.” Investors believed the editorial to be a precursor to a wider crackdown on
the gaming sector and sold off accordingly.” analyst Cui wrote. By Thursday, however, trenchant versions of the text had already disappeared from news sites.
Shortly after, further clarifications and softer tones followed. Newspapers called on schools, parents and educators to jointly curb excessive gambling. This sounded much more amicable to industry representatives and did not suggest harsh regulations. The editor-in-chief of the propaganda newspaper Global Times also stressed on WeChat that markets should “not over-interpret” the opium remark. Analyst Cui points out that the comparison to opium has been circulating since 2015. “The sell-off in gaming stocks began without any official clarification from authorities.”
The Chinese Video Game Association also opposed the Xinhua comment, stressing that games emit “positive energy” and are by no means “wild beasts”. To what extent games are actually harmful to adolescents is completely unclear. The Video Game Association is also controlled by the party, which here – as on many other issues – does not take a unified line until the top leadership intervenes.
But, as a matter of fact, the top brass already signals the direction of this topic. Party leader Xi Jinping had already commented on video games in March, putting them on the same level as other “dirty and obscure things to be found online,” according to a Xinhua report. The National People’s Congress had just deliberated on the issue – with a clear bias towards more effective regulation. It is in such a context, then, that the recent discussion in state media should be seen. No wonder that Tencent has now preemptively limited the possible screen time.
The industry now has no choice but to get in line. “Those that show compliance and shrink their underage user base will be spared.,” Cui believes. However, publishers also have many older audiences – an advantage over the tutoring industry, which is facing extinction after a recent crackdown (as reported by China.Table). Only six percent of Tencent’s revenue was officially made on users under 18. Pocket money just doesn’t stretch as far as a salary. However, Cui suspects that many kids play on accounts of their parents.
The words of warning to the video game industry should be considered as part of a major clean-up effort by the government to bring more compliance and ethics to economic affairs. “Chinese policymakers have been cracking down on sectors whose business practices they believe harm China’s social fabric,” Cui writes. On Thursday, for example, stocks of the alcohol and tobacco sectors have dropped. News agency Xinhua had reported the day before that young people were gaining access to e-cigarettes. What would have simply been a journalistic piece in Western countries shakes markets in China when it comes from Xinhua. After all, the government’s current appetite for making its companies aware of goals beyond mere profit is palpable. “The dramatic market reaction to the editorial underscores how sensitive investors have become to official guidance,” Cui wrote.
Attention is now shifting to live-streaming. Europe has its own share of live streamers, but the Chinese are particularly avid – both as streamers and viewers. Young people are quick to broadcast their entire daily lives in real-time, gaining thousands and thousands of followers in the process. The state-owned newspaper “Economic Daily” has now denounced the spread of “tasteless content” via live-streaming platforms. As a result, stocks of video services, for example, of Kuaishou, dropped.
Just one block away from Beijing’s Foreign Ministry, devout Chinese light incense sticks day by day in front of hundreds of holy figures in the Dongyue temple, asking their respective patron saint to watch over life, death and fate, wealth, happiness or health. Founded in 1319, the once most important Daoist monastery complex in northern China was destroyed several times but had always been rebuilt. Twenty years ago, atheist Beijing reopened it as a “people’s art museum” and provided replicas of the 1,316 deity figures counted in 1928. Nevertheless, the temple has not lost its spiritual attraction.
Folk saints are booming. The socialist People’s Republic even allowed the creation of new spirits as a mixture of marketing and devotion, such as the God of the Potato (土豆神). The population makes offerings to his larger-than-life figure in the Beijing agricultural suburb of Yanqing, where refined potatoes are grown on a large scale.
The potato god became an emblem of the 2015 “World Potato Conference” held in Yanqing. Food expert and celebrity chef Zhang Aiguo dedicated his first bowl of Chinese shao mai ravioli to the deity after he was able to make it from 25 percent potato flour. By then, Zhang had spent ten years experimenting to add 30 percent potato flour to 200 typical Chinese pasta products, ranging from rice cakes, mantou and huaquan to noodles, without consumers tasting the difference.
For the sacrificial ceremony, Zhang wore a sewn-on Chinese flag and the state emblem on his chef uniform. He said it’s not just about the tastiest recipe and for how to better integrate potatoes into the Chinese diet, but also about the state-bearing question: “Who feeds China?” But this, he says, is a patriotic task.
Until now, the potato – which according to the National Potato Museum in Yanqing was imported 400 years ago – had spent its existence as a shade plant in China’s diet. Shredded, steamed, stir-fried, cooked in strips or in a stew, it was never more than a mundane vegetable side dish for the Chinese. Since 2015, Beijing has wanted to upgrade the vitamin-rich tuber to staple food and put it on an equal footing with rice, wheat and corn. China’s citizens, meanwhile, don’t want to get used to them as a “strategic” filling side dish. They bring up the rear in terms of global per capita consumption, even though China is the world’s largest potato producer.
Beijing’s potato lobby is keeping its eye on the ball. It just anchored a forced cultivation in Inner Mongolia and in three northeast provinces in the 2025 five-year plan, the Ministry of Agriculture announced. The 300 potato dishes developed in the meantime, “which correspond to Chinese taste,” would also ensure a breakthrough.
To the outside world, China does not appear to have a food problem. Its farmers doubled their grain yields to 607 million tons annually between 1978 and 2014, and now produce 650 million tons. The Ministry of Agriculture announced that China’s grain stores were filled with a year’s worth of wheat and rice.
But on the downside, groundwater levels in the granaries of central and northern China have dropped to historic lows, and soils are depleted, overfertilized, and contaminated with pesticides. The country is also dependent on the global market for 100 million tons of soybean imports annually. Chinese agronomists call the low-water and fertilizer-consuming, cold-resistant potato an alternative solution for feeding the nation.
The propagandist of China’s superior social system, Xi Jinping, of all people, warned at a Central Committee agricultural conference on Dec. 23, 2013, just a year after his ascension to party leader, not to consider the grain problem solved just because China brought in several years of good harvests: “We must not be too naive on this issue. In our history, there have been so many famines, even gruesome cannibalism. “咱们不要太天真！我国历史上发生了多少次大饥荒，饿殍遍野，甚至人相食，惨绝人寰！
Extensive self-sufficiency is also a political question. In the event of an agricultural crisis, all commercial grain on the global market – where only 300 million tonnes are available – would not suffice. “Even if we bought up all of it in the event of a crisis, we would only have enough to last for half a year.” Moreover, China would throw world supply, trade and prices into chaos.
The 30-pages long text was published in a Chinese “selection of important speeches after the 18th Party Congress” (十八大以来重要文献选编). Xi speaks straight: He belongs to a generation “for whom hearing the word ‘ration stamps’ feels like yesterday. We still remember what hunger is.” During the hardships of 1959 to 1961, he went to a school where supper consisted of a watery soup, but it did not satiate him. During the Cultural Revolution, he worked in a peasant brigade (as reported by China.Table). For three months, there was not a drop of cooking oil in his food. When he received money from his family and used it to buy frozen pork in winter, as did several of his friends, they snipped off the meat on the way home and ate it raw. “It tasted heavenly.”
In his speech, he excoriated the horrendous waste of food by the splurging of his compatriots: More than 200 million Chinese could be fed for a year on grain and food thrown away in restaurants every year. Xi is having all of China’s eateries inspected to see if their “plates are being emptied”. In August 2020, he ordered a relaunch of his campaign due to an increase in food waste after the introduction of an online food ordering and delivery service, first hailed as a reform. The catering industry would throw away some 18 billion kilograms of food waste each year. In May 2021, the People’s Republic became the first country in the world to enact a law against food waste, punishing waste by catering services and consumers with heavy fines.
Whether by the help of a potato god, or by strict laws: The old question. “Who will feed the Chinese?” still remains on Beijing’s agenda. It is the Achilles’ heel of China’s rising model and the dream of rebirth as a world nation.
The Olympic Games in Tokyo end on Sunday. Are the athletes in the Olympic village already discussing the best destinations for their beach vacation? For the Chinese triple jumper Zhu Yaming, the working days already regularly end in the sand. Afterward, he was allowed to attend the award ceremony. He won the silver medal.
The alleged negative effects of violent video games served as a topic in German elections many years ago. Now, the discussion about video games is also raging in China. And the tone is just as fierce. Video games are being shunned as “spiritual opium” and “dirty things”. Authorities are now taking action against gambling addiction and late-night gaming. Finn Mayer-Kuckuk explains how the gaming industry is becoming the newest target of the authorities in their fight for more compliance and ethics in business life. To prevent conflicts with state authorities, some companies are now taking proactive action.
Comac is also threatened by disputes. The aircraft manufacturer wants a piece of the pie and aims to compete with the top dogs Boeing and Airbus. Comac is about to receive certification of their first large passenger aircraft manufactured in China – the C919. Our team in Beijing reports on the rapid growth of the Chinese aircraft market. Although Chinese aircraft are not yet cutting edge, large orders from Chinese state-owned airlines are expected to provide the necessary sales. An unfair competition? Perhaps. But Boeing and Airbus also grew with the help of government subsidies – which ultimately led to a years-long trade dispute at the WTO.
I hope you enjoy our latest issue, and I wish you a pleasant weekend
China’s video games industry fears increasing pressure from the authorities. A series of comments in state media is seen by investors as a harbinger of a new slew of regulations aimed at the protection of youngsters from the potential dangers of mobile and online games. “Concerns grew as Covid restrictions kept more children indoors and
online,” writes analyst Ernan Cui of Gavekal-Dragonomics. “Further restrictions on underage gaming will likely materialize.” The government has already proven many times that it is not afraid to clash with its highly profitable industries.
Screen time has once again increased during the pandemic. The number of underage gamers playing more than two hours a day on their mobile phones increased from 12.5 to 13.2 percent in 2020. Even more children and teenagers now have online access. The revenue of the Chinese gaming industry amounts to 279 billion yuan (35 billion euros).
Tencent, the world market leader in mobile games, finds itself at the center of this discussion. The company’s tremendous success, especially on the domestic market, has led to young Chinese people spending more and more time and money on the game apps made by the company.
This week, Tencent has now more or less voluntarily limited the daily game time of its hit title “Honor of Kings” 王者荣耀. Teens are now only allowed to play for one hour on weekdays, then the app shuts down. Even on days off, only two hours are possible. Previously, the limit was one and a half and three hours respectively. Previous limits on in-app purchases remain in effect. The company even uses facial recognition to detect underage mobile users pretending to be older.
But with such actions in good faith, Tencent is unlikely to prevent further regulation by the government. Tellingly, state media proposed exempting the gaming industry from tax breaks for emerging tech firms. It is no longer an upcoming economic branch, but an established billion-dollar industry, argued the Securities Times. On the contrary, companies like Tencent should give back to society by paying higher taxes, they proposed.
Further amendments to the Youth Protection Act 未成年人保护法 are being discussed, with the most recent adjustment made as recently as June 1. Under Section 1C, a separate paragraph covers online games. It requires the industry to clearly identify players so that underage players cannot circumvent the restrictions. “Inappropriate applications or functions” should not be accessible to children and young people. The enabling of night-time gaming is prohibited. Smartphones are not allowed on school property without explicit permission from teachers.
The debate over the video game industry has already gone through several rounds. On Monday, state media had rallied against computer games through multiple commentaries published simultaneously, calling them “spiritual opium”: a serious attack, because opium has severe historic connotations in China. Prior to the Opium Wars, Britain had noticeably weakened China’s economic strength and overall vitality by supplying drugs on a large scale.
Now, Xinhua has identified a similarly dangerous enemy within. Online games are said to be as dangerous for the youth as “floods and wild beasts”. For the sake of sheer profit, game developers are ruining an entire generation, opinion-makers proclaimed.” Investors believed the editorial to be a precursor to a wider crackdown on
the gaming sector and sold off accordingly.” analyst Cui wrote. By Thursday, however, trenchant versions of the text had already disappeared from news sites.
Shortly after, further clarifications and softer tones followed. Newspapers called on schools, parents and educators to jointly curb excessive gambling. This sounded much more amicable to industry representatives and did not suggest harsh regulations. The editor-in-chief of the propaganda newspaper Global Times also stressed on WeChat that markets should “not over-interpret” the opium remark. Analyst Cui points out that the comparison to opium has been circulating since 2015. “The sell-off in gaming stocks began without any official clarification from authorities.”
The Chinese Video Game Association also opposed the Xinhua comment, stressing that games emit “positive energy” and are by no means “wild beasts”. To what extent games are actually harmful to adolescents is completely unclear. The Video Game Association is also controlled by the party, which here – as on many other issues – does not take a unified line until the top leadership intervenes.
But, as a matter of fact, the top brass already signals the direction of this topic. Party leader Xi Jinping had already commented on video games in March, putting them on the same level as other “dirty and obscure things to be found online,” according to a Xinhua report. The National People’s Congress had just deliberated on the issue – with a clear bias towards more effective regulation. It is in such a context, then, that the recent discussion in state media should be seen. No wonder that Tencent has now preemptively limited the possible screen time.
The industry now has no choice but to get in line. “Those that show compliance and shrink their underage user base will be spared.,” Cui believes. However, publishers also have many older audiences – an advantage over the tutoring industry, which is facing extinction after a recent crackdown (as reported by China.Table). Only six percent of Tencent’s revenue was officially made on users under 18. Pocket money just doesn’t stretch as far as a salary. However, Cui suspects that many kids play on accounts of their parents.
The words of warning to the video game industry should be considered as part of a major clean-up effort by the government to bring more compliance and ethics to economic affairs. “Chinese policymakers have been cracking down on sectors whose business practices they believe harm China’s social fabric,” Cui writes. On Thursday, for example, stocks of the alcohol and tobacco sectors have dropped. News agency Xinhua had reported the day before that young people were gaining access to e-cigarettes. What would have simply been a journalistic piece in Western countries shakes markets in China when it comes from Xinhua. After all, the government’s current appetite for making its companies aware of goals beyond mere profit is palpable. “The dramatic market reaction to the editorial underscores how sensitive investors have become to official guidance,” Cui wrote.
Attention is now shifting to live-streaming. Europe has its own share of live streamers, but the Chinese are particularly avid – both as streamers and viewers. Young people are quick to broadcast their entire daily lives in real-time, gaining thousands and thousands of followers in the process. The state-owned newspaper “Economic Daily” has now denounced the spread of “tasteless content” via live-streaming platforms. As a result, stocks of video services, for example, of Kuaishou, dropped.
Just one block away from Beijing’s Foreign Ministry, devout Chinese light incense sticks day by day in front of hundreds of holy figures in the Dongyue temple, asking their respective patron saint to watch over life, death and fate, wealth, happiness or health. Founded in 1319, the once most important Daoist monastery complex in northern China was destroyed several times but had always been rebuilt. Twenty years ago, atheist Beijing reopened it as a “people’s art museum” and provided replicas of the 1,316 deity figures counted in 1928. Nevertheless, the temple has not lost its spiritual attraction.
Folk saints are booming. The socialist People’s Republic even allowed the creation of new spirits as a mixture of marketing and devotion, such as the God of the Potato (土豆神). The population makes offerings to his larger-than-life figure in the Beijing agricultural suburb of Yanqing, where refined potatoes are grown on a large scale.
The potato god became an emblem of the 2015 “World Potato Conference” held in Yanqing. Food expert and celebrity chef Zhang Aiguo dedicated his first bowl of Chinese shao mai ravioli to the deity after he was able to make it from 25 percent potato flour. By then, Zhang had spent ten years experimenting to add 30 percent potato flour to 200 typical Chinese pasta products, ranging from rice cakes, mantou and huaquan to noodles, without consumers tasting the difference.
For the sacrificial ceremony, Zhang wore a sewn-on Chinese flag and the state emblem on his chef uniform. He said it’s not just about the tastiest recipe and for how to better integrate potatoes into the Chinese diet, but also about the state-bearing question: “Who feeds China?” But this, he says, is a patriotic task.
Until now, the potato – which according to the National Potato Museum in Yanqing was imported 400 years ago – had spent its existence as a shade plant in China’s diet. Shredded, steamed, stir-fried, cooked in strips or in a stew, it was never more than a mundane vegetable side dish for the Chinese. Since 2015, Beijing has wanted to upgrade the vitamin-rich tuber to staple food and put it on an equal footing with rice, wheat and corn. China’s citizens, meanwhile, don’t want to get used to them as a “strategic” filling side dish. They bring up the rear in terms of global per capita consumption, even though China is the world’s largest potato producer.
Beijing’s potato lobby is keeping its eye on the ball. It just anchored a forced cultivation in Inner Mongolia and in three northeast provinces in the 2025 five-year plan, the Ministry of Agriculture announced. The 300 potato dishes developed in the meantime, “which correspond to Chinese taste,” would also ensure a breakthrough.
To the outside world, China does not appear to have a food problem. Its farmers doubled their grain yields to 607 million tons annually between 1978 and 2014, and now produce 650 million tons. The Ministry of Agriculture announced that China’s grain stores were filled with a year’s worth of wheat and rice.
But on the downside, groundwater levels in the granaries of central and northern China have dropped to historic lows, and soils are depleted, overfertilized, and contaminated with pesticides. The country is also dependent on the global market for 100 million tons of soybean imports annually. Chinese agronomists call the low-water and fertilizer-consuming, cold-resistant potato an alternative solution for feeding the nation.
The propagandist of China’s superior social system, Xi Jinping, of all people, warned at a Central Committee agricultural conference on Dec. 23, 2013, just a year after his ascension to party leader, not to consider the grain problem solved just because China brought in several years of good harvests: “We must not be too naive on this issue. In our history, there have been so many famines, even gruesome cannibalism. “咱们不要太天真！我国历史上发生了多少次大饥荒，饿殍遍野，甚至人相食，惨绝人寰！
Extensive self-sufficiency is also a political question. In the event of an agricultural crisis, all commercial grain on the global market – where only 300 million tonnes are available – would not suffice. “Even if we bought up all of it in the event of a crisis, we would only have enough to last for half a year.” Moreover, China would throw world supply, trade and prices into chaos.
The 30-pages long text was published in a Chinese “selection of important speeches after the 18th Party Congress” (十八大以来重要文献选编). Xi speaks straight: He belongs to a generation “for whom hearing the word ‘ration stamps’ feels like yesterday. We still remember what hunger is.” During the hardships of 1959 to 1961, he went to a school where supper consisted of a watery soup, but it did not satiate him. During the Cultural Revolution, he worked in a peasant brigade (as reported by China.Table). For three months, there was not a drop of cooking oil in his food. When he received money from his family and used it to buy frozen pork in winter, as did several of his friends, they snipped off the meat on the way home and ate it raw. “It tasted heavenly.”
In his speech, he excoriated the horrendous waste of food by the splurging of his compatriots: More than 200 million Chinese could be fed for a year on grain and food thrown away in restaurants every year. Xi is having all of China’s eateries inspected to see if their “plates are being emptied”. In August 2020, he ordered a relaunch of his campaign due to an increase in food waste after the introduction of an online food ordering and delivery service, first hailed as a reform. The catering industry would throw away some 18 billion kilograms of food waste each year. In May 2021, the People’s Republic became the first country in the world to enact a law against food waste, punishing waste by catering services and consumers with heavy fines.
Whether by the help of a potato god, or by strict laws: The old question. “Who will feed the Chinese?” still remains on Beijing’s agenda. It is the Achilles’ heel of China’s rising model and the dream of rebirth as a world nation.
The Olympic Games in Tokyo end on Sunday. Are the athletes in the Olympic village already discussing the best destinations for their beach vacation? For the Chinese triple jumper Zhu Yaming, the working days already regularly end in the sand. Afterward, he was allowed to attend the award ceremony. He won the silver medal.
