China’s move to curb children’s time on smartphone may leave adverse impact on country’s tech-savvy generation

Aiming to regulate children’s phone time for “anti-addiction” purposes, China has issued a draft guideline, which can however, end up limiting access to information for the country’s tech-savvy generation, DW News reported.

The regulation which is set to enter the legal process on September 2 after being open for public comment, stipulates that mobile devices and apps must include a built-in ‘minor mode’ that restricts daily screen time to a maximum of two hours.

The time limit will decrease based on the user’s age, with usage restricted to 40 minutes per day for those younger than 8. Additionally, those under 18 cannot use their mobile gadgets between 10 pm and 6 am within this mode, DW News reported.

As per the new regulations, the parents will be able to decide whether to adopt the restrictions and extend the time limits.

The draft rules, released by the Cyberspace Administration of China, also called for “content security”, meaning information online should consist of “socialist values” that help children cultivate “good morality”, DW News reported.

However, China’s top internet regulator maintains that the new requirements are intended to protect minors from accessing information identified as “illegal or harmful” to their physical and mental well-being.

This proposal has been welcomed by many parents.

“I think this proposal is really good,” Kong Lingman, a parent and auditor working in Shanghai, told DW. “Minors spending too much time on phones can chip away at quality family time.”

Many supporters also took to the Chinese social media platform ‘Weibo’, leaving positive comments like “Well done” under various government posts about the announcement.

However, the proposal isn’t without criticism.

“The result of wanting to control everything is that nothing ends up being controlled well,” one user commented, garnering hundreds of likes under a post from the Weibo account of China’s state media, People’s Daily, according to DW News.

The proposal follows a series of measures implemented to bolster China’s cyberspace governance. It began with a 2019 limit on video game playing time for those under 18, referred to as the “youth mode”.

Initially, the instruction allowed for 90 minutes of online gaming per day on weekdays. But in 2021, a more stringent update limited Chinese teenagers to one hour of video game playing on Fridays, weekends and public holidays, DW News reported.

Video and live streaming apps were also instructed to follow an “anti-addiction system” that required all users to register with real names and government-issued identification documents.

“This sequence of policies indeed follows a specific pattern,” Tai Yu-Hui, an associate professor of communication and technology at Taiwan’s National Yang-Ming Chiao-Tung University, told DW.

She said that Beijing is aiming to “uphold the concept of national security” by focusing on three areas: the internet, entertainment and youth.

Meanwhile, China’s internet penetration rate has exceeded 76 per cent as of June 2023, according to a report released by the China Internet Network Information Center

With an expanding internet user base, social media videos and mobile gaming may be perceived as capitalistic forms of entertainment activities -a distraction from government propaganda, as per DW News.

Tai further told DW that since President Xi Jinping came to power a decade ago, “there has been a trend of integrating the political ideology into day-to-day entertaining content”.

In March, a white paper issued by China’s State Council Information Office outlined a clear goal to ensure “the internet develops within the confines of the law.”

Notably, since parents will have the final say in whether to adopt the rules, researchers said it’s yet to be seen what impact this restriction may have on children.

Immediate impacts of the proposal have already been felt by Chinese tech firms. On the day the guidelines were published, shares in some of the country’s internet giants sharply dropped during afternoon trading in Hong Kong, DW News reported.

These companies included Weibo, the video streaming app Bilibili, the short video-sharing app Kuaishou, and Tencent, which operates the popular messaging platform WeChat.

Around two years ago, when Chinese authorities tightened the rules for the “youth mode,” several apps already implemented measures to adhere to the official guidelines.

For instance, Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok, implemented at the time a “teenage mode,” which restricted kids under 14 to 40 minutes of daily usage on the short-video platform, DW News reported.

Now the upgraded restrictions are likely to further push tech companies to revise their user settings to avoid violating the guidelines.

Tai has called it as “another setback” for the industry, as a prolonged regulatory crackdown on China’s tech companies recently appeared to be coming to an end.

Since the draft only addresses illegal and mentally harmful information without any specific definitions, tech firms could just “resort to self-censorship to avoid crossing any red lines,” DW News quoted her as saying.