Why China is probably never getting Pokemon Go

Even if you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware of the Pokemon Go phenomenon by now (if for no other reason that you’ve probably had kids crawl under your rock looking for Pokemon to catch). Rather inexplicably, the game isn’t available anywhere in Asia yet, but it is almost certainly coming sooner or later.

Well, sooner to later to most countries. But there’s good reason to believe it might never be coming to China.

The essence of Pokemon Go

To understand why, you need to know a little about Pokemon Go and its origins. The game, although it licenses The Pokemon Company’s Pokemon IP, was developed by American mobile game developer Niantic Labs, an offshoot of Google. The game users augmented reality and location-tracking on users’ phones, mapping virtual Pokemon into the real world to reward players who get outside and explore.

This exploration has already had some unintended consequences. Pokemon Go players have found dead bodies (several, actually), fallen off cliffs, and trespassed in all sorts of places (sometimes even getting shot at by property owners).

You can understand why a game like that might not appeal to Chinese authorities.

Photo credit: Saad Akhtar.

The problem with Pokemon Go

China’s government is, to put it mildly, a little bit uptight when it comes to foreigners and GPS coordinates. In 2013, when Coca-Cola made use of location-tracking services in China, it was accused of breaking the law. And when Yang Rui*, the host of a state media program dedicated to fostering productive dialogue between China and the rest of the world, wrote on his microblog that “Foreign spies seek out Chinese girls to mask their espionage and pretend to be tourists while compiling maps and GPS data for Japan, Korea and the West,” he was applauded by many. What seemed to most foreigners like paranoid nonsense apparently seemed reasonable enough to Yang Rui’s bosses that he retained his position as host of the show despite the controversy.

Pokemon Go, although it’s not available in China, is already making people nervous. A popular Weibo conspiracy theory goes that the entire game is a US-Japanese plot to GPS map China and determine the locations of Chinese military bases to facilitate quick strikes if a war ever breaks out.

That’s ludicrous, of course, but Chinese authorities probably are concerned about the game, although no one has yet said as much publicly. Here’s why they might be concerned:

1. Niantic is American and closely associated with Google, which is probably the Chinese government’s least favorite American tech company. The government doesn’t want GPS data on the real-time movements of millions of Chinese people in the hands of Google.
2. Pokemon Go is not an American military conspiracy, but the game certainly could lead to people wandering around Chinese military bases and secret areas looking for Pokemon. The only way to ensure that didn’t happen would be to provide Niantic with GPS data for all sensitive locations the government wants excluded from the game, but of course that’s not data China would ever hand over to a foreign company.
3. Looking at the Pokemon Go movement patterns could reveal military bases and other sensitive areas to Niantic because the company would see where users don’t go. If there’s a big black spot where monsters are spawning but users aren’t going to catch them, Niantic could reasonably assume that there was something there people were being kept away from.

Basically, a wildly-popular foreign game that uses constant location tracking is likely to be perceived as a possible intelligence threat.

In this climate? No way.