Digital Babysitters: Battling Phone Addiction in China’s Rural Schools

Yang Tingting (杨婷婷)

The growth of cellphone addiction among China’s “left-behind” children and the researchers and teachers fighting against it

Xia Zhuzhi only lets his 6-year-old daughter use the internet for 30 minutes a day. “Kids can’t let go of their cellphones,” says the 36-year-old associate professor from Wuhan University. “Childhood shouldn’t be about squatting in a corner scrolling through a phone all day.”

Many other parents aren’t so strict. During the Spring Festival holiday this January, Xia visited his relatives in rural Huangshi, Hubei province, but found that their pre-teen son rarely emerged from his bedroom. He was engrossed in his phone all day and refused to even greet Xia. “That’s no childhood ,” says Xia. “Childhood should be about finding playmates to share fun times, and experiencing happiness and sadness together.”

Since September 2021, Xia and 149 other researchers from Wuhan University have visited nine rural counties in Henan, Hubei, and Jiangxi provinces to explore a phenomenon sweeping the countryside—cellphone addiction.

They found rural minors, especially the country’s 12 million “left-behind” children whose parents have moved away to work in distant cities , are spending most of their spare time indulging in short videos and mobile games without adequate supervision from their caregiver (often grandparents).

After surveying more than 1,000 households each year, the researchers found that cellphone addiction has profoundly impacted the physical and mental well-being of children, from their academic achievements to their daily lives and even family bonds. Many families and schools are at a loss with how to deal with children glued to their phone screens.

A report published this January by the China Rural Governance Research Center at Wuhan University, which Xia helped write, found that over two-thirds of 13,172 parents thought their left-behind children had a tendency to cellphone addiction, while over a fifth reported that their children were already seriously addicted. Over 40 percent reported their child had their own cellphone, while half of them said their child used a grandparent’s device.

“There are few children playing and enjoying themselves in rural areas,” Xia tells TWOC. When Xia and his research team visited Yangxin county, Hubei province, they didn’t see any children on the way until they reached the hotel—two boys and one girl, around seven years old, all engrossed in a short-video platform on a cellphone in the hotel lobby. “Even during school breaks, classrooms and playgrounds are eerily quiet. Rather than play outside, children, especially boys aged between 8 and 14, prefer spending time watching short videos and playing video games . The social realm of rural children is swiftly shifting from nature to virtual space,” explains Xia.

Li Huanhuan, a 22-year-old teacher in rural Chenzhou, Hunan province, is constantly checking whether her students have brought their phones to class. All the 40-plus students (most of them left-behind children) in her middle school class have their own mobile phones and WeChat accounts. “The boys play video games and watch short videos, while the girls take photos,” Li, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, tells TWOC.

When Li visits children at home, she finds “some students are quite introverted. They don’t know how to communicate with teachers…They don’t say anything but just bow their heads and play on their phones.” Judging by the frequency they post updates on their WeChat social feeds (or “Moments”), some students spend their entire day online.

One of Li’s students even had to drop out and was sent to an internet addiction center for a year after he began spending entire days on his phone in bed. An elementary school teacher in a county in Jiangxi told Xia and his team that more than half of their students spend over 10 hours glued to their cellphones on weekends.

Elementary and middle school students are at higher risk of cellphone addiction, Xia says, because they have more free time than high schoolers who have longer school days, shorter holidays, and typically better supervision.

“Left-behind children have no one to supervise them, so they of course turn to cellphones. Once-popular activities like rope skipping, playing basketball, and going fishing have all disappeared in rural areas. Now, smartphones have become everything. They’re incredibly convenient and affordable,” Xia tells TWOC.

In Xia’s own school days in Huangshi in the 1990s, he had to walk over 10 kilometers to attend classes. In that era without smartphones and computers, his spare time was filled with picking wild fruits in the mountains, climbing trees to find bird nests, fishing in rivers, and playing with rubber bands.

When Xia visited Huangshi for research in 2021, however, children told him a different story. Among the more than 30 students in one elementary school class, only one did not have their own cellphone. Some students were even aware of the problem, according to Xia: “They said ‘What else can I do if I don’t play on my phone?’ and ‘I don’t want to be addicted, but I can’t help myself anymore.’”

The grandparents who often care for left-behind children can be extremely cautious about the children going out to play, fearing they will get into fights, drown , play with fire, or even fall from trees. “[Grandparents and parents] are afraid that kids are not safe outside the house,” says teacher Li. “In the past, nobody cared whether kids played outside, but now they are told to go directly home after school and stay at home, where they watch TV or play on their cellphones.”

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