The old proverb “The purpose of your life may be to serve as a warning to others” scales up to the national level, if China’s swift and decisive reaction to the American Woke Cult is any indication.
Over the last few weeks, China has shown that it isn’t just charting an alternative course on economics and governance. China is also attempting an entirely new approach to modernization itself. Even if this approach fails, the choices China makes say important things about the decay of American liberal democracy.
The People’s Republic is launching what, at least superficially, looks like one of the most ambitious social-engineering efforts ever undertaken in a developed country.
The decrees have come in a vast wave over the past couple weeks. In the last days of August, China announced that, from now on, schoolchildren are banned from playing video games, except for three hours on the weekend.
Members of Gen Y roused to the defense of vidya should pause here before falling into a common Boomer error. Zoomers’ interaction with video games bears little resemblance to your cherished childhood habit of coming home from school, tossing your backpack on the floor, and getting in an hour of Star Fox before Mom returned from work. Today, Zoomers spend up to nine hours a day staring at screens.
Gen Y’s relatively moderate consumption of games, movies, and TV spawned the Pop Cult. Now imagine the Zoomers at 40 if current trends continue.
The Chinese did, and they’re taking steps to avert generational disaster.
“Teenagers are the future of our motherland,” Xinhua quoted an unnamed NPPA spokesperson as saying. “Protecting the physical and mental health of minors is related to the people’s vital interests, and relates to the cultivation of the younger generation in the era of national rejuvenation.”
What does this national rejuvenation program entail? Technically it started some years ago with the repeal of the One Child Policy. That measure alone has proved insufficient to bolster China’s underwater birth rate, so Chinese officials have taken a step back, assessed the problem, and formulated a new action plan.
China’s top media regulator has announced a boycott of what it called “sissy idols”, among other new guidelines, during an ongoing “clean up” of the entertainment industry.
The authorities have been increasingly critical of the trend some refer to as “sissy men”, which include pop idols that wear make-up or who do not conform to “macho” male stereotypes prevalent in traditional Chinese culture. Some in China also see the popularity of such idols, often referred to as “little fresh meat”, as a threat to traditional social values.
Folks on social media are calling China’s ban on sissies “based”, but the rationale behind the move goes deeper. Nearby South Korea, from which most of the foppish celebrities in question hail, has a birthrate which is not only lower than communist China’s, it’s the lowest in the world.
China studied their liberal democratic neighbor and traced Korea’s ills to high costs of raising and educating children and excessively burdensome social demands on parents.
The burden of this pursuit has caught the attention of officials who want couples to have more children. China’s ruling Communist Party has tried to slow the education treadmill. It has banned homework, curbed livestreaming hours of online tutors and created more coveted slots at top universities.
China may have banned video games, but they also banned homework. Do CCP leaders secretly homeschool?
Looming even larger than the Korean education crisis is their increasingly dysfunctional relationship between the sexes. If those disorders sound familiar, it’s because South Korea imported them from us.
In America and many other Asian countries, coverage of “famous for being famous” celebrities has long stood out as one of the most garish and decadent aspects of modern popular culture. Think about Keeping Up with the Kardashians or the child tranny biopic I am Jazz, or before that, Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie on The Simple Life.
In America’s liberal democracy, those elevated to celebrity status have become totems, sacred objects and leading indicators of what sickens American society. Consider the famous Kardashian clan. Kim Kardashian, the daughter of a famous participant in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, became “famous” in her own right after the release of one of the first viral sex tapes, featuring her and rapper Ray J.
Of course, one of the most famous members of the extended Kardashian clan is Bruce Jenner, who in 2015 became the “first wave on D-Day” shocktrooper of transgenderism.
“But the CCP persecutes Christians!”
Yes, they do. In fact, China’s new initiative includes a fresh wave of crackdowns on the Church. The state restricting Christians’ right to live their faith plain evil.
A state forcing children to worship Aztec demons, on the other hand, is downright abominable.
The idea isn’t to draw a false binary that crowns China with a white hat. Though, to be honest, the Chinese have a firmer grasp on the concept of “binary” than the West does. If you’re looking for good guys on the world stage, try Poland or Hungary. The point is that various nations are embracing or rejecting provably dysgenic behaviors to varying degrees, and on that count China is beating the US hands down.
China can look ahead to how society has evolved in countries that are richer than it. And right now, China looks at American culture, and the culture of its Korean satellite, and sees compelling examples of what to avoid.
This revulsion on the part of Chinese elites is a powerful indication of America’s decline.
As is our nominally Catholic puppet-in-chief’s vow to muster all government resources in defense of infanticide.
Still, the honest truth is that whatever China does to promote wokeness in the US is a drop in the ocean compared to America’s own political and cultural leaders. China may find “wokeness” geopolitically useful, but its leaders clearly regard it as absolute poison that must be kept out of China itself at all costs.
This, by itself, is enough to conclude that Chinese leaders in crucial respects care more about their nation and their people than American leaders do about this country and its people. When China’s leaders see poison coursing through society, they act to stop it. In America, our leaders promote, subsidize, or even mandate it. The poisonous woke agenda has become a defining feature of American identity. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the woke agenda is as crucial to America’s dominant institutions as the CCP agenda is to the dominant institutions in China.
The pernicious Conservative habit of referring to our existential enemies as Commies is not only Boomer cringe, it’s bad rhetoric. Good rhetoric is based in truth. Not only do avowed communists revile the Woke Cult, they take extreme measures to keep Wokeism from infecting their people.
That’s not to advocate for communism, as a thoroughly discredited nineteenth century economic theory, it’s frankly irrelevant to the spiritual and tribal struggles that will decide the future. The real takeaway is that foreign communist party bosses now look saner and more relatable than the rulers of the country that won the Cold War. The decades since the Berlin Wall fell have shown liberal democracy to be far worse for a nation’s long-term survival than archaic political parties based on crackpot economics.
Which, significantly, are failing to stop the growth of the Church despite their best efforts.
It is estimated that by 2030, there would be 250 million Christians in China.
For those keeping track, that’s about 50 million more than currently reside in the US.
Cardinal George’s prophecy continues its unbroken track record, only the Christians who will rebuild Western civilization will most likely come from the East.
In the meantime, don’t give money to people who hate you. Support artists who entertain you.
China wants its men to be hearty like its chopsticks. Chinese chopsticks are long and thick, which makes them ideal for sharing communal meals and clinging to greasy foods.
Korean chopsticks, meanwhile, are usually flat and metallic. They have more precision, but the food slips more easily—and the metal becomes hot when the chopsticks are used for soups. Make of that what you will.
Brian
To answeronev of your question.
No the chicoms don’t homeschool. In fact very recently as if 2 or 3weeks ago, the party banned private tutoring (called tuition in Asia). Many Asian investors lost a significant amount of their investments.
I’ve taught mainland Chinese kids, teens mostly. The amount of ennui and utter loss of purpose is heartbreaking and the Chinese variant of communism is outright pirtitually harmful
I’m curious as to what kind of Christianity is emerging. From my very superficial look, it seems to be the sola scriptura evangelism. It’s a first step but they need to be brought to the fulness of the faith.
That means we have to our part at home.
xavier
Did you notice any differences between the Chinese female students and the male students? The Chinese female students that I met in university seemed happy, but they might have been trained to be spies.
D al
I taught teens. So the girls faced different pressure.
In China, videogames are an outlet for stress and some imagination. The cost is a cultural shallowness that’s off putting. They don’t read in Chinese and have no interest in reading in English.
Banning videogameslooks based but it’s being replaced with….. sterile indoctrination.
Not the win/own people think it is.
The problem is the party is usurps the parents natural rights.
So colour me unimpressed
xavier
Your sarcasm detector needs adjustment.
Brian
Sorry. I didn’t pick it up at all.
Mea culpa.
xavier
Absolvo te.
The video game ban is for online games which provably ARE harmful for kids. Back in the 2000s I heard the kids running around the Gamestop going on about how all they ever did was play Call of Duty. They sink hours upon hours of their lives into this sort of stuff.
When we were kids we didn’t really have those games. It’s entirely different from devoting yourself to a no death run in Super Mario Bros for an hour versus playing the same PvP game for nine hours straight. In the ’90s we would stop playing vidya and do other things. In Current Year, everything is cordoned off into “Communities” so no one ever spreads their wings and does other things.
As much as China does a lot of awful things, this isn’t one of them. Xbox Live is one of the worst things to happen to kids. Sorry, fellow gamers.
My friends were as nerdy as they come and we still had many summer days where we said “I’m sick of playing Mario. Let’s go outside and throw the frisbee around.”
Didn’t really see people throw their whole lives into a game until World of Warcraft.
Future historians will describe WoW as a blight that ruined a generation. The world is well rid of it.
That’s an important difference. My Gen X friends can still pop in a retro game, play for 45 minutes, and turn it off to go do something else. Moderation is a lost art.
I remember dreaming of the possibilities of online gaming back when Nintendo introduced the X Band. At last, my friends and I would be able to play our favorite games whenever we wanted, wherever we were!
Instead, online games completely destroyed the social aspect of gaming.
That depended on what you played. The higher barrier for entry to many Source engine mods made them fun to play with strangers.
The videos from the Source era are also time capsules of Millennial social dynamics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHheOoErmaI
They jury’s out on whether that even counts as socialization. I mean the social activity of getting together at the arcade or a friend’s house to play games in person.
To this day, online gaming is still a poor substitute for couch co-op and lan parties. It’s never matched up. Unfortunately, most kids don’t know that because they were trained and grew up in this faceless online-only world set up by brands as substitute communities.
It’s no coincidence just about every AAA game tries to have some sort of garbage battle royale mode. The sooner this gets destroyed the better.
You could see a real culture shift in community servers over the years. Early on they were seen as more as a variation on the LAN. Sure you would never know the people there as well as at an actual LAN, but people at least kept track of the quirks of regulars and had some social banter between games.
But as time went on the basic form of multiplayer went more and more to matchmaking on company servers, and the communication options became less and less. You would very likely never encounter the same player twice, and you would have no way to interact in any meaningful fashion with other players, especially enemies. The distinction between them and bots in single player became less and less. Some games still have community servers, most notably Team Fortress 2, but newcomers rarely treat them as a community. They just connect, mess around without interacting with anyone, and then leave never to return.
It’s no wonder that so many Zoomers form parasocial interactions with let’s players. Even a one-sided relationship like that is more social interaction than they ever experienced in an online game, never mind an in person LAN party or console couch co-op game.
“China may find “wokeness” geopolitically useful, but its leaders clearly regard it as absolute poison that must be kept out of China itself at all costs.”
@CurrentCitizen made a good point regarding China’s use of “wokeness”:
“China and Russia need to be real careful with this shit. This is a memetic virus, possibly demonic. Cynically evoking this shit to own America is like trying to “ironically” summon Satan”
Casting demonic rhetoric is a dangerous move, especially when subverting the positive trends we see in China would be more profitable to Satan than attacking a fallen nation such as America.
We need to keep in mind that the Chinese are human beings and can choose abandon Christ, much like many in the West have done. We should pray that Chinese Christians keep the spread of Christianity in the East going, and that they remain stalwart in their faith when facing down enemies both visible and invisible.
Thank you for the blog post!
The Han has the advantage of a monoculture (sometimes enforced at the end of a bayonet) they very much believe in. They had their crazy years (the cultural revolution) and just want to win the culture war. The elites here will laugh at all this backward thinking, but their children’s children (those who bother to have them) will be dealing with a world dominated by China.
And now for your “get off my lawn” moment. One of the first things some of us did with those new fangled home computers (that’s what we called them back in the stone age) was write games. Sure they were shitty games (with 32K of memory, that’s all you were going to be able to do), but the exercise taught us a lot about programming. The funny thing was, once we play tested them to our own view of perfection, we left them alone. For us it really was the journey, not the destination.
Chris
I’m not so sure they’ve gotten over their crazy years. I suspect Xi will provoke another one. Not so much about limiting video game play but the obsessive zeal to prop up zombified state owned enterprises and consolidate party supremacy.
Commies fear and destroy any autonomous locus of life. A blasphemous application of nuland saved extra eccelesiam.
It’s a race as to who will be last in the upcoming collapse
xavier
Think China’s going to ban women from higher education anytime soon? That would be another sign they’re serious.