Honestly if I had to guess it’s partly because of grandparents are raising their grandchildren while their kids go off to work in the cities. Beijing wants those kids to stay in their home provinces and they refuse to let the kids be enrolled into school in the cities where their parents are (link to a clip talking about this system). If the parents lived in the same home as their children, they would have an much easier time setting ground rules when it comes to games.
Video game regulations in asian countries are odd. In South Korea Minecraft is an adult only rated game because Microsoft/Mojang have refused to play along with local regulations with regards to time restrictions for the underaged and online gameplay. China has only two ratings for video games… yes and no. It’s only recently that major local players have started to put together a rating system for content (something that had been in the US & Canada since the 90’s lol).
China had been basically burning down their soft power and getting super paranoid of other’s soft power lately. New restrictions on domestic celebrities and online fan culture, giving a massive middle finger to Hollywood by not approving new movies for domestic release and messing up western studios’ schedules of films for “patriotic reasons & events” and companies becoming so scared of having celebrities promote their products in case there’s a big crackdown that they’re will to use completely fabricated virtual celebrities to shill their products. I seriously doubt these new restrictions of games are for completely altruistic reasons.
