Chinese Cities Are Writing School Phone Bans Into Law — and Banning Schools From Smashing Phones
Chongqing, Guangzhou, Zhengzhou and Fujian have turned the school phone ban from a school rule into local law. The new statutes let schools confiscate phones but forbid the public smashing incidents of past years — legislation aimed at principals as much as pupils.
The school rule that forbids students from bringing their phones to class is becoming statute. Over the past few weeks, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Zhengzhou and Fujian province have all issued local regulations letting schools ban phones from campus outright, upgrading what used to be a school-level rule into a legally binding constraint — the kind a principal can now point to rather than argue for.
The move lands in the middle of a debate that Chinese schools have been having louder than most. Screen anxiety here has its own extremities: several schools have gone viral in past years for confiscating phones and then destroying them — smashed on stage, dropped in water — as a public lesson in discipline. Those spectacles were widely criticised, not because the crowd objected to phone control but because the phones belonged to the students. A device bought with pocket money is, legally, a minor's property, and destroying it is not discipline but damage.
The new regulations are, unusually, written with that in mind. As the outlet Cover News explained in the report that circulated this weekend, the laws give schools a custody power and nothing more: a confiscated phone may be held, not harmed, and a school that destroys a student's property is now on the wrong side of the same statute that lets it confiscate in the first place. The framing — "drawing the boundary of responsibility, curbing extreme management" — treats the law as a two-sided instrument, regulating the school as much as the child.
That is the detail worth an outsider's attention. Elsewhere the argument over phones in schools tends to run between parents and educators; China's version has added a third party, the local legislature, and it is regulating conduct on both sides of the teacher's desk. The bans follow a national directive from the Ministry of Education, in force since 2021, that barred phones from primary and secondary classrooms — but a ministry notice and a local ordinance are different weights of thing, and the shift to law makes the ban enforceable uniformly rather than at each school's discretion.
The story drew enough attention to reach Baidu's news board over the weekend, where the comment that recurs is about the smashing years: users welcome the ban itself, several noting that classrooms were becoming unmanageable, but want the confiscation rules spelled out as concretely as the ban — how long a phone can be held, who returns it, and what happens when a "custodian" turns out to be another phone-smasher.
The statutes answer a version of that: custody, not destruction, with legal liability on the school that oversteps. Whether that resolves the underlying fight — between an education system that sees the phone as the century's great classroom threat, and a generation that conducts its childhood on one — is the part no legislature has been asked to draft yet.