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I never understand to what end. Is it simply power? What is the point of it? You cannot crime or human behavior to misbehave. I wonder how long it will be un

I never understand to what end. Is it simply power? What is the point of it? You cannot crime or human behavior to misbehave. I wonder how long it will be until China's citizens start to crack under the pressure.

HeavenFox 5y ago
It is cultural. In Confucianism, the relationship between a father and a son, a superior and their subordinate, a state and its citizen are considered equal. Therefore it is considered normal for the state to be paternalistic. Also, collective responsibility takes precedence over individual freedom. Each person is supposed to conform to its role in society. Children’s role is to study, rather than play video games all night. Together, you get a video game ban, enforced by the full power of the state. Until a few years ago, video game consoles are banned in China for the exact same reason.
- jbluepolarbear 5y ago
  What do they do to people that can’t conform?
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Re-educate.
    - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
      I wish I didn’t look this up.
      - andai 5y ago
        Could you share what you wish you hadn't found?
        jbluepolarbear 5y ago
        The treatment of the Uyghur people was the first thing that popped up on google when I search “re-education China”
        vmarva 5y ago
        Considering what Muslims constantly do here in Europe, I applaud China for taking measures before things spiral out of control. Hope EU will finally get their heads together and act as well before it's too late.
        jbluepolarbear 5y ago
        You need to check yourself. Being part Syrian, I have a lot of Muslim family and I find great offense to your support of genocide. A small number of Muslims are radical, no different than the radical Christians here in the US. Are all Christians deserving of being round up, put in camps, and all free will taken away?
    - derefr 5y ago
      I think the GP comment meant, like, low-functioning autistic people. Not people who won’t conform; people who cannot. People who do not have the mental capacity to grasp and conform to social norms. I don’t think China is sending such people to re-education camps. Those camps don’t have the infrastructure required to care for such people. They only really “work” as an oubliette for able-bodied/able-minded people that will understand and carry out orders when threatened with force. (I’d believe you if you instead said they were e.g. having nursing staff at Chinese hospitals do secret state-sanctioned eugenic infanticides, to avoid having such people around in the first place. But allowing parents to invest a lot of resources into raising unable-to-conform children, just to then inevitably send those children [likely permanently] to re-education camps, seems wasteful.)
      - baffythegoat 5y ago
        Do you think a totalitarian state makes that distinction? They are not known for their sensitivity. I would imagine they are simply dispensed with.
      - nefitty 5y ago
        It would take me some time to dive into the prevalence of abusive “therapies” or what every day life is for autistic people in China. I did find this report about a rehabilitation center that forces autistic children to walk 19km (12 miles) per day as part of their treatment. It gained notoriety after a 3-year old died while in the center. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/811/toddler-jia-jias-death-highlights-autism-ignorance https://www.sixthtone.com/news/811/toddler-jia-jias-death-hi...
        derefr 5y ago
        That does sound more like it. My point was that this type of pseudo-“rehabilitation” can’t really be conflated with pseudo-“re-education.” No matter how abusive these rehabilitation centres are, they still have staff and facilities that the POW-camp-like environment of a re-education facility doesn’t (and probably cost a lot more to run.) Similar to the difference between state prisons and state mental asylums in America in the 1960s.
  - HeavenFox 5y ago
    About ten to fifteen years ago, “Internet addiction” was perceived to be a big problem among the youth in China. Kids would skip school and play video games in Internet cafes. Someone opened an “Internet addiction treatment center”. Parents would pay to send their kids there, where they are deprived of their freedom, be indoctrinated about their “sins”, and even subject to electric shock. [1] The state official television network, CCTV, aired a documentary endorsing the practice. I am not making this up. Obviously nobody cares about this anymore because literally everyone is an Internet addict. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Yongxin#Internet_addiction_treatment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Yongxin#Internet_addictio...
    - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
      Can you expand on what you mean by "everyone is an internet addict"? I mean in the examples you gave, you mention the children skipped school - which is a problem. The article and some other commenters mention a nighttime gaming ban - which is a reaction to kids staying up at night to play video games. Clearly there IS a problem, and the Chinese government has this way of solving it. In the west there's similar solutions. For game time, parents can use parental controls, time limits and bedtimes to set up phones and the like to not work at night. The government(s) are more concerned about gambling mechanics in games.
      - HeavenFox 5y ago
        It's a problem of phrasing. Back then, for an average person, there wasn't much to do on the Internet, except online games and chatting with friends, both of which are considered a waste of time. As a result, Internet itself was demonized, and Internet addiction was considered a problem, even a mental disorder. Nowadays, China has a booming tech sector. Everyone is using the Internet all the time to browse TikTok videos, stream TV shows, order food delivery and shop deals. And people stopped talking about Internet addiction, because suddenly they realize they themselves fit the clinical definition, which was to be online for more than a few hours a day.
        noduerme 5y ago
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - karmasimida 5y ago
    There isn't much a kid can do to not conform. Beating up by your parents are pretty common in China, and nobody gives a flying f--k about what you do with you kids. People would praise you for deploying violence, because that shows you are a strict parent, and the level of willingness you would spend on 'rectifying' the behavior of your kids. And the parents would always tell the kids the violence right now is good for them, with a kind of twisted logic that early age suffering would be made up with later success in your life. So to many Chinese family, in China or in west, the kids are not treated as individuals, they are a form of property/investment of the whole family. The parents are willing to invest a ton of money in the kids' education, in exchange to greater control/say in shaping up the kids' future. It is a different social contract all together, I don't personally like it, but I am thankful for my parents for paying up all my tuition all the way until graduate degree, then that is super expensive for them, so there is trade-off.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      In all societies, people don't care what you do with your kids if you beat them up. But they care a lot what you do with your kids, if you teach your kids to question authority. When I grew up we were taught that police were basically stupid, pathetic authoritarians with no power, who needed to hold weapons to prove they had little dicks. We were taught that anyone who claimed to know something about "God" was a fraud. And we were taught never to say these things in public, because the government would put us in a foster home and Dad and Mom would get arrested. [edit] We were also taught that marijuana and other drugs help you relax and be creative, that sex within a loving relationship is a good thing, that there's nothing wrong with pornography, that prostitution is an important outlet for sexually repressed men who would otherwise become violent, and that guns are for idiots who can't talk their way out of problems. All of these are still very dangerous views in most of the world.
- whoevercares 5y ago
  > Until a few years ago, video game consoles are banned in China for the exact same reason First time I realized I was playing my PSP, gameBoy and PlayStation2/3 games illegally
an_opabinia 5y ago
The people living there want this. People in the Soviet Union believed in a lot of ineffective things too. If opposing viewpoints were better accepted there would be no restrictions. People aren’t stupid, the system just ill informs them.
- sidlls 5y ago
  I disagree: people are very dumb. Not merely ignorant or misled, but actually stupid. No one nationality, ethnic group, or other arbitrary grouping is smarter than any other; they're all equally stupid.
yfzhou 5y ago
Kids addicted to gaming -> bad family relations & bad grades -> decreased productivity & unemployment -> social unrest -> people revolt against the communist party. I'd argue the fact that CCP solves problems at the source is exactly the reason China didn't crack when people thought it would.
- concordDance 5y ago
  > bad family relations & bad grades -> decreased productivity & unemployment That particular link is not causitive, but correlative. Very little of education causes productivity.
AussieWog93 5y ago
>Is it simply power? What is the point of it? You can read my post history; I'm anything but a Chinese Nationalist and Xi lover. Still, I don't think this law is crazy. It clearly serves a purpose of protecting children from harm. The enforcement is creepy, but as a law I don't see it as any different to the laws about parents supplying alcohol to minors in Australia.
- godelski 5y ago
  I don't know, I don't think putting cameras in minors' rooms is going to keep them safe. That just screams exploitation to me. Either Tencent is hacked, Tencent accidentally gathers those images, or someone hacks the cameras because now you have millions of people that leave their cameras facing them at all times. None of those are a great situation and the likelihood of each of those happening isn't low. This is without even getting into a discussion about government monitoring citizens through cameras in their homes. That is quite literally the premise of 1984. Well I should take that back, the premise was the gov could watch you at any time, not that they actively are.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    >I don't think putting cameras in minors' rooms is going to keep them safe I wasn't referring to the cameras (" The enforcement is creepy"...), but it does make sense why a government would want to pass laws limiting gaming/screen use late at night amongst teenagers. I went through it as a teenager and the lack of sleep causes all kinds of mental health and behavioural issues.

HeavenFox 5y ago

It is cultural. In Confucianism, the relationship between a father and a son, a superior and their subordinate, a state and its citizen are considered equal. Therefore it is considered normal for the state to be paternalistic. Also, collective responsibility takes precedence over individual freedom. Each person is supposed to conform to its role in society. Children’s role is to study, rather than play video games all night. Together, you get a video game ban, enforced by the full power of the state. Until a few years ago, video game consoles are banned in China for the exact same reason.

jbluepolarbear 5y ago
What do they do to people that can’t conform?
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Re-educate.
  - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
    I wish I didn’t look this up.
    - andai 5y ago
      Could you share what you wish you hadn't found?
      - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
        The treatment of the Uyghur people was the first thing that popped up on google when I search “re-education China”
        vmarva 5y ago
        Considering what Muslims constantly do here in Europe, I applaud China for taking measures before things spiral out of control. Hope EU will finally get their heads together and act as well before it's too late.
        jbluepolarbear 5y ago
        You need to check yourself. Being part Syrian, I have a lot of Muslim family and I find great offense to your support of genocide. A small number of Muslims are radical, no different than the radical Christians here in the US. Are all Christians deserving of being round up, put in camps, and all free will taken away?
  - derefr 5y ago
    I think the GP comment meant, like, low-functioning autistic people. Not people who won’t conform; people who cannot. People who do not have the mental capacity to grasp and conform to social norms. I don’t think China is sending such people to re-education camps. Those camps don’t have the infrastructure required to care for such people. They only really “work” as an oubliette for able-bodied/able-minded people that will understand and carry out orders when threatened with force. (I’d believe you if you instead said they were e.g. having nursing staff at Chinese hospitals do secret state-sanctioned eugenic infanticides, to avoid having such people around in the first place. But allowing parents to invest a lot of resources into raising unable-to-conform children, just to then inevitably send those children [likely permanently] to re-education camps, seems wasteful.)
    - baffythegoat 5y ago
      Do you think a totalitarian state makes that distinction? They are not known for their sensitivity. I would imagine they are simply dispensed with.
    - nefitty 5y ago
      It would take me some time to dive into the prevalence of abusive “therapies” or what every day life is for autistic people in China. I did find this report about a rehabilitation center that forces autistic children to walk 19km (12 miles) per day as part of their treatment. It gained notoriety after a 3-year old died while in the center. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/811/toddler-jia-jias-death-highlights-autism-ignorance https://www.sixthtone.com/news/811/toddler-jia-jias-death-hi...
      - derefr 5y ago
        That does sound more like it. My point was that this type of pseudo-“rehabilitation” can’t really be conflated with pseudo-“re-education.” No matter how abusive these rehabilitation centres are, they still have staff and facilities that the POW-camp-like environment of a re-education facility doesn’t (and probably cost a lot more to run.) Similar to the difference between state prisons and state mental asylums in America in the 1960s.
- HeavenFox 5y ago
  About ten to fifteen years ago, “Internet addiction” was perceived to be a big problem among the youth in China. Kids would skip school and play video games in Internet cafes. Someone opened an “Internet addiction treatment center”. Parents would pay to send their kids there, where they are deprived of their freedom, be indoctrinated about their “sins”, and even subject to electric shock. [1] The state official television network, CCTV, aired a documentary endorsing the practice. I am not making this up. Obviously nobody cares about this anymore because literally everyone is an Internet addict. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Yongxin#Internet_addiction_treatment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Yongxin#Internet_addictio...
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    Can you expand on what you mean by "everyone is an internet addict"? I mean in the examples you gave, you mention the children skipped school - which is a problem. The article and some other commenters mention a nighttime gaming ban - which is a reaction to kids staying up at night to play video games. Clearly there IS a problem, and the Chinese government has this way of solving it. In the west there's similar solutions. For game time, parents can use parental controls, time limits and bedtimes to set up phones and the like to not work at night. The government(s) are more concerned about gambling mechanics in games.
    - HeavenFox 5y ago
      It's a problem of phrasing. Back then, for an average person, there wasn't much to do on the Internet, except online games and chatting with friends, both of which are considered a waste of time. As a result, Internet itself was demonized, and Internet addiction was considered a problem, even a mental disorder. Nowadays, China has a booming tech sector. Everyone is using the Internet all the time to browse TikTok videos, stream TV shows, order food delivery and shop deals. And people stopped talking about Internet addiction, because suddenly they realize they themselves fit the clinical definition, which was to be online for more than a few hours a day.
      - noduerme 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- karmasimida 5y ago
  There isn't much a kid can do to not conform. Beating up by your parents are pretty common in China, and nobody gives a flying f--k about what you do with you kids. People would praise you for deploying violence, because that shows you are a strict parent, and the level of willingness you would spend on 'rectifying' the behavior of your kids. And the parents would always tell the kids the violence right now is good for them, with a kind of twisted logic that early age suffering would be made up with later success in your life. So to many Chinese family, in China or in west, the kids are not treated as individuals, they are a form of property/investment of the whole family. The parents are willing to invest a ton of money in the kids' education, in exchange to greater control/say in shaping up the kids' future. It is a different social contract all together, I don't personally like it, but I am thankful for my parents for paying up all my tuition all the way until graduate degree, then that is super expensive for them, so there is trade-off.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    In all societies, people don't care what you do with your kids if you beat them up. But they care a lot what you do with your kids, if you teach your kids to question authority. When I grew up we were taught that police were basically stupid, pathetic authoritarians with no power, who needed to hold weapons to prove they had little dicks. We were taught that anyone who claimed to know something about "God" was a fraud. And we were taught never to say these things in public, because the government would put us in a foster home and Dad and Mom would get arrested. [edit] We were also taught that marijuana and other drugs help you relax and be creative, that sex within a loving relationship is a good thing, that there's nothing wrong with pornography, that prostitution is an important outlet for sexually repressed men who would otherwise become violent, and that guns are for idiots who can't talk their way out of problems. All of these are still very dangerous views in most of the world.
whoevercares 5y ago
> Until a few years ago, video game consoles are banned in China for the exact same reason First time I realized I was playing my PSP, gameBoy and PlayStation2/3 games illegally

an_opabinia 5y ago

The people living there want this. People in the Soviet Union believed in a lot of ineffective things too. If opposing viewpoints were better accepted there would be no restrictions. People aren’t stupid, the system just ill informs them.

sidlls 5y ago
I disagree: people are very dumb. Not merely ignorant or misled, but actually stupid. No one nationality, ethnic group, or other arbitrary grouping is smarter than any other; they're all equally stupid.

yfzhou 5y ago

Kids addicted to gaming -> bad family relations & bad grades -> decreased productivity & unemployment -> social unrest -> people revolt against the communist party. I'd argue the fact that CCP solves problems at the source is exactly the reason China didn't crack when people thought it would.

concordDance 5y ago
> bad family relations & bad grades -> decreased productivity & unemployment That particular link is not causitive, but correlative. Very little of education causes productivity.

AussieWog93 5y ago

>Is it simply power? What is the point of it? You can read my post history; I'm anything but a Chinese Nationalist and Xi lover. Still, I don't think this law is crazy. It clearly serves a purpose of protecting children from harm. The enforcement is creepy, but as a law I don't see it as any different to the laws about parents supplying alcohol to minors in Australia.

godelski 5y ago
I don't know, I don't think putting cameras in minors' rooms is going to keep them safe. That just screams exploitation to me. Either Tencent is hacked, Tencent accidentally gathers those images, or someone hacks the cameras because now you have millions of people that leave their cameras facing them at all times. None of those are a great situation and the likelihood of each of those happening isn't low. This is without even getting into a discussion about government monitoring citizens through cameras in their homes. That is quite literally the premise of 1984. Well I should take that back, the premise was the gov could watch you at any time, not that they actively are.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >I don't think putting cameras in minors' rooms is going to keep them safe I wasn't referring to the cameras (" The enforcement is creepy"...), but it does make sense why a government would want to pass laws limiting gaming/screen use late at night amongst teenagers. I went through it as a teenager and the lack of sleep causes all kinds of mental health and behavioural issues.