Big Buntstift is watching you

Communism is not known for its love of diversity. And yet the selection of absurd news from China is just as colorful and bulging as a candy shelf in an American supermarket. (To be fair, China doesn't necessarily stand out for communism).

The Snickers manufacturer Mars Wrigley experienced a shitstorm because he called Taiwan a "country" - the chocolate giant has already promised improvement. Fish will be tested for Covid and offered for hire to bridesmaids - not too pretty and not too ugly. And now the People's Republic is giving out pens to its students who are equipped with a camera. The videos are forwarded directly to their teachers so that they can check whether and how the tasks are being done.

This is reported by the French news site "franceinfo" and refers to a Chinese newspaper. Accordingly, this practice has been common in some provinces for a few years. Now she has also arrived in the south of the country. A teacher had given out the "free pens" to his students to check if they did their homework during the summer. What is really absurd, however, is that this procedure seems harmless if you read on about the surveillance techniques that already exist in China: At some test schools, the identity of every student is checked by a recognition system when they enter the school. In addition, headsets are distributed that measure brain activity during class. So that nobody dreams, it's supposed to be ... well, what actually? … be “thought”? The government wants to raise the educational level of its citizens.

It also solves the annoying problem of students having to put their other monitoring device, their smartphone, aside during class. You know the horror when your teacher looks over your shoulder while you're writing and suddenly you can't think of anything. For Chinese students, it now sits directly in the pen. Perhaps he will soon use vibrations in his hand to measure how moved the students are when they learn about the speeches by President Xi Jinping. His ideas are part of the curriculum and are now even a subject of their own. Soon the only place where students could retreat to was the bathroom. It remains to be hoped that China will not start a major contract with Japanese smart toilets. Who knows what you could do with them.