A girl sat through an entire graduation ceremony tapping her fingers on her lap, mimicking a phone game she'd played so many times the muscle memory had taken over. That image sits at the center of what I'm talking about today: what doom scrolling is actually doing to kids' ability to concentrate, communicate, and just be present in a room. Fourteen students at a classroom party, sitting in a row, silent, all staring at their iPads and saying nothing to each other. Social skills erode quietly, and the devices are a big part of why.

Responsibility is the harder question. I know students whose parents made them earn screen time through good grades rather than handing over a device and walking away. That approach works. The problem is that young teenagers want adult-level freedom, and some parents give it to them before the limits are anywhere near established. Governments are starting to respond, with restrictions on gaming hours for minors in mainland China and bans on TikTok and similar platforms for under-16s in countries around the world. Whether those bans hold is another question, but the direction is clear.

The phone itself is not the problem. Writing postcards, describing a place in real sentences, the physical act of forming characters by hand: these are skills that fade when digital becomes the only mode. Even in China, secondary students are showing up unable to recognize basic characters because typing has replaced writing entirely. A child who can't stop tapping their fingers even after the phone is taken away hasn't just developed a bad habit. They've never been taught that there's a time to put it down.

Published on Subwave

https://subwave.app/@e3113/post/phones-in-the-classroom-are-winning

Six or seven hours south of Hong Kong on a train to Fuzhou, I had no briefing beyond a WeChat message telling me to find a young woman holding a sign at the exit. I cover what WeChat actually is for people unfamiliar with it: not just a messaging app, but the infrastructure of daily life in China, handling payments, tax records, train tickets, hotel bookings, and food orders in one place.

Fuzhou in 2016 was classed as a tier-three city, meaning no metro system yet, and the tier system works simply by infrastructure improvements moving a city up the rankings. None of that prepared me for what I saw out the train window: tower blocks, office blocks, a McDonald's, a KFC. The China I had pictured from the outside, mountains, rice fields, people in straw hats, had nothing to do with the China I was arriving in.

A 20-year-old Mercedes S-Class was waiting in the car park, driven by a woman of about 19 or 20 who would be my chauffeur for the next hour. She asked me within minutes whether I had ever tried spicy chicken feet. I had not. My entire prior experience of Chinese food was chicken balls, sweet and sour sauce, and fried rice. She had never left China, mentioned London the way you would mention somewhere you had never seriously imagined reaching, and told me that for many people, especially older generations, the world beyond China simply was not something they knew much about. She told me to close my eyes and rest. I did not rest.

Published on Subwave

https://subwave.app/@e3113/post/my-first-day-in-a-chinese-tier-three-city

In 2016, I was unloading containers of chilli powder on a forklift in Felixstowe, six in the morning to six at night, living in a caravan, when one of my boxing students messaged from Asia: "I got you a job in China." I left with one suitcase, a backpack, an iPad, a phone, a passport, and £1,495 after paying for the flight.

Getting there was its own ordeal. A 12-hour layover in Mumbai where I couldn't leave the terminal, a lost suitcase that contained my only clean boxer shorts, and a work visa process that involved handing my passport to a man with glasses and a brown bag at the top of an escalator in a Hong Kong underground station. I had a one-way ticket and no backup plan, so I handed it over.

Two days later I had my passport back, a visa stamped inside it, and a WeChat message with a train booking number. My bags arrived at 2 p.m. and I needed to be at the border crossing by 3. Standing there, about to step into mainland China for the first time, I had no idea what the next ten years were going to look like. Ten years on, I'm writing this from a rented apartment in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, having just left China after a decade of teaching English as a second language.

Published on Subwave

https://subwave.app/@e3113/post/one-suitcase-to-china-on-1495