Regulating play
When a government agency sees its job as regulating something, it's natural that the leaders and the bureaucrats in that agency might see more to regulate than outsiders do. And when two agencies have adjacent (or slightly overlapping) jobs, it's easy to anticipate that they might be in competition with one another.That might be especially true in a country like China when those with political power see parts of their job as regulating political behavior. Then again, we've seen examples of that in U.S. history, too.
Chinese Agencies Struggle Over World of Warcraft
It could almost be a snippet from a World of Warcraft game session — two competing titans, plotting against each other, swapping punches, embarked on a quest for a single prize that only the stronger of them will claim.
But this is not virtual reality. The titans are two agencies of the Chinese government. And their quest, during which they have traded a few blows in the past week, is for a comparatively mundane prize: the power to regulate the real World of Warcraft, among the most popular online games in China.
Last Monday, the Chinese General Administration of Press and Publication ordered the Shanghai-based operator of World of Warcraft, Netease, to shut down its servers for the game, saying it had rejected the company’s application to be the host of the game’s four million Chinese players.
But by Wednesday, the Ministry of Culture had struck back.
“In regards to the World of Warcraft incident, the General Administration of Press and Publication has clearly overstepped its authority,” a ministry official, Li Xiong, was quoted as saying in the Economic Information Daily, a newspaper in Beijing. “They do not have the authority to penalize online gaming.”
The ministry said it had that authority. And it said Netease was perfectly free to offer the game on computers in China. The matter now appears destined for settlement by the State Council, the Chinese government’s cabinet.
Such bureaucratic hair-pulling might seem petty, were so much not at stake…
Which agency will win the regulatory battle remains unclear, although the Culture Ministry, with allies among other ministerial-level offices, is said to enjoy an edge. Regardless, there appears to be much for both offices to do. The government this summer proclaimed its desire to clean up the Internet, ridding it of pornography, gambling, violence and seditious material.
The Culture Ministry dived further into that Herculean task in the past week, announcing sanctions against 188 companies that it said were running unlicensed, vulgar or overly violent online games. Netease and World of Warcraft were conspicuously absent from the list.
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Labels: bureaucracy, China, politics
posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:39 AM
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