The video game is the opium of the people! Word of the Chinese Communist Party
China's broad crackdown on the perceived antisocial tendencies of its largest companies continued on Tuesday with a new industry being targeted: video games.
Beijing's latest attempt to curb the excesses of capitalist development – and reaffirm the "primacy of socialism", as – came on Tuesday in the form of an article published by the Xinhua-affiliated "Economic Information Daily" that offered fierce criticism. of the video game industry in China and its impact on minors. The article states (citing anecdotes from teenagers) that they spend up to 8 hours a day playing the most popular game in the country: "Honor of Kings".
The article sparked a sell-off in the shares of Tencent, the supplier of "Honor of Kings," which fell 6.1% after hitting 10%, and other major Chinese video game titles. In response to the article; so Tencent announced new strict limits for minors using its video game platforms allowing them only 1 hour of play per day (with 2 hours on holidays). Even more than Alibaba, Tencent has become the biggest market victim of China's crackdown on everything from ridesharing, payments, music rights, private teaching and now video games.
Shares of Chinese companies, including NetEase, game developer XD, and mobile game company GMGE Technology Group, also posted strong sales. The selloff also extended to the United States, where shares of Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts, Zynga and Take Two Interactive fell between 1% and 4% in pre-market trading.
Tencent in a statement said it will introduce additional measures to reduce the time and money spent by minors on gaming, starting with "Honor of Kings". It also called for an industry ban on games for children under the age of 12.
The company did not address the article in its statement, nor did it respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
The article published by the Economic Information Daily was taken offline (although the print edition still carried the story), but Reuters highlighted a few select excerpts. One in particular caught our attention: the article branded video games as "spiritual opium".
In the article, the newspaper listed "Honor of Kings" as the most popular online game among students who, it said, played up to eight hours a day.
"'Spiritual opium' has grown into an industry worth hundreds of billions," the newspaper said.
"…. No industry, no sport, can develop in such a way as to destroy a generation".
It was later republished, removing some of the heavier terms (such as "spiritual opium"). For China, the reference to opium is loaded with historical significance, as Reuters reminds us.
As the violent selloff gained momentum, another Chinese media published a new piece offering some clarification on the crackdown. The piece tried to put the guilt argument aside, saying it would be "immoral" to blame gambling companies and that parents and the wider community are responsible for dealing with excessive gambling.
However, everyone saw a parallelism between "The spiritual opium" and "The opium of the peoples" of the Marxist ideology, almost as if videogames were the new religion.
Thanks to our Telegram channel you can stay updated on the publication of new articles of Economic Scenarios.
The article The video game is the opium of the people! Word of the Chinese Communist Party comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-videogioco-e-loppio-dei-popoli-parola-di-partito-comunista-cinese/ on Tue, 03 Aug 2021 19:30:28 +0000.