Labelling China Orwellian is often a blunt attack, one that misses the diversity and dissent of its 1.4 billion population. But when the state compels you to play video games designed by the government’s propaganda department, Orwellian is appropriate.
China’s Study the Great Nation app, launched earlier this year, does what the name suggests: it helps you to study, via news articles, videos and quizzes, the People’s Republic of China. The app is more dystopian, though. Party cadres and students are mandated to play the game, and have their points – earned by reading articles to the end and watching a video for at least five minutes – monitored by their bosses and teachers.
So what is inside this digital version of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book? For starters, rather than Mao being the subject of scholarship, this time round it’s Xi Jinping, the Chinese president who has hoarded power like no other since the revolutionary zealot. Many observers have noted that Xi also seeks to build a Mao-like cult of personality; the Chinese name of the app is Xuexi Qiangguo – a pun on Xi’s name.
The pun is fitting because the vast majority of games in the app are devoted to the president's political philosophy: “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”. The ideology was enshrined in the Chinese constitution in October 2017, a few months before the Communist Party passed an amendment that will allow Xi to rule for life – a situation unheard of since the Cultural Revolution.
The vast majority of the app, which was designed by the government’s Publicity Department in partnership with the tech giant Alibaba, is news articles. Enticing headlines such as The Ministry of Natural Resources does well in preventing and controlling natural disasters and People from all walks of life in Africa highly value President Xi’s congratulatory letter are two of the hundreds that players can choose to read. It is hoped the app will be a social networking tool, with points awarded for commenting on articles. Additional functions include allowing users to send messages to each other, manage to-do lists and organise events.
But the main function of the app is studying. As well as hitting workplace targets, points earned on the app will be redeemable for prizes in future updates, the developers say. There have been reports of public shaming sessions and self-criticisms for students and state employees whose scores have been too low.
Given the government push behind Study the Great Nation, it soon became the most-downloaded app on Apple’s domestic App Store. But the reception on the ground hasn’t been as positive. Reviews of Study the Great Nation on the App Store have been disabled since February, but earlier feedback included a number of one star reviews, including “I play this game voluntarily, it is good” and “Why is [this game] mandatory?”.
Read more: The complicated truth about China's social credit system
Qiu Yuan, a teacher in Beijing, refused to download the game after a close reading of the terms and conditions revealed the app gains access to your ID card number, real name, “bio-data” gleaned from the annual health check that most workers do through their employer, phone number, shopping history, location data, deleted content and other personal information. “It’s not really a game,” she said.
Some of those who have been forced to download the app have themselves found a way to game the system. One project on GitHub entitled “fuck-xuexiqiangguo” contains freely downloadable software “that helps adults (and maybe future kids) learn automatically,” by playing the game and earning points while the user just leaves the app running. It's a piece of code that acts as a bot.
In the ideal vision, though, Study the Great Nation puts the Party in your hands and your life in the Party’s. The gamifying of personal data is one tenet of the social credit system, the now notorious government plan to collect data from every part of citizens’ lives, and to use that data to mete out punishments to those who break social codes, such as jaywalking, defaulting on debts, smoking on trains and criticizing the government.
As it stands, only those who have failed court orders to repay debts have felt the full effects of this system: over 17 million people are on a public blacklist that bans offenders from buying plane tickets. But the government wants social credit to be comprehensive by 2020, and apps such as Study the Great Nation are one way of gathering the requisite data.
For anyone living in China, most of their data is already accessible by government. Facial recognition technology is increasingly widespread, and nearly every facet of daily life is conducted through either WeChat or Alipay, which are owned by Tencent and Alibaba spin-out Ant Financial respectively – tech companies that are intimately linked with the state. China’s Cybersecurity Law, passed in late 2017, formalised the de facto obligation that tech companies already had to share user data with the government.
Earlier this year, hackers uncovered a database of over 2.5 million people in the western province of Xinjiang who were being tracked by the Shenzhen-based company SenseNets. Xinjiang is a predominantly Muslim area where it is estimated that around one million people are in extra-judicial detainment aimed at stamping out any expression of Muslim identity. For those not detained, pervasive digital surveillance has become the norm, with the local government rolling out smartphone monitoring software and punishing people who use virtual private networks.
With a host of surveillance opportunities and technologies already at the government’s fingertips, Study the Great Nation is something new. As well as observing Chinese citizens, the government hopes that the app can be a way for citizens to refocus their own attention on the glory of the nation. In a country where everyone is under watch, the monitors want to ensure that they are also seen.
Updated April 17, 2019 15:16BST: Ant Financial, a spin-out of Alibaba, owns AliPay. Alibaba doesn't directly own the payment service
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
