Jump Cut, No. 63, summer 2025
Dataveillance through caring for children:
Motherhood, kids’ smartwatches, and everyday surveillance in China
by Jingyi Guo
Here I explore the advertising discourse of kids’ smartwatches in China that normalizes dataveillance towards children from the perspective of feminist surveillance studies. I particularly pay attention to a brand named IMOO which occupies the largest market share in China’s kids’ smartwatch market. Focusing on practices of the “quantified child” promoted by the commercials of IMOO kids’ smartwatches and in dialogue with previous scholarship on the datafied child, I examine
- intimate surveillance in mothers’ care for their children via the smartwatches;
- self-surveillance in children’s consumption and usage of the smartwatches; and
- social surveillance in children’s social interactions with peer groups with the smartwatches.
Employing an intersectional critical feminist approach to interrogate everyday surveillance, my argument is that IMOO kids’ smartwatches gain success in the heteropatriarchal technology market in China as it promotes surveillance culture by pandering to mothers’ desire and the imperative to care for their children, consolidating fathers’ domestic masculinity as breadwinners, and enforcing gendered discipline of girls.
“We provide parents with all-around peace of mind, and give children healthier bodies and dream-like experiences.”
These words come from a leaflet marketing IMOO kids’ smartwatches in China in early 2022. The sales pitch both promises a multi-faceted reassurance for parents (“all-around peace of mind”), and emphasizes benefits to children: “healthier bodies” and “dream-like experiences”. In the leaflet, the kids’ smartwatch appears very similar to a smartphone, with functions such as step-counting, photo-taking, video-calling, and even digital platforms for music-listening and mobile payment. In their daily lives, children wearing IMOO kids’ smartwatches can chat with friends, share photos, and see peers’ updates by using MiniChat installed exclusively in IMOO smartwatches. Meanwhile, parents can also call their children, track the child’s location and health status, and limit the child’s usage of the smartwatch through a mobile application designed by IMOO (see Liu, Zhang, and Lu, 2024). But what features make the smartwatch a technology specifically for children? How does it embody and possibly influence ideas about childhood and parent/child relationships in contemporary China? Moreover, how do children’ smartwatch advertisements rationalize data-based surveillance of children and continue market expansion?
Here I examine how dataveillance towards children is justified by analyzing the advertising discourse of kids’ smartwatches in China. I particularly pay attention to narratives promoting the “quantified child” in kids’ smartwatch advertisements offered by the brand IMOO. Meaning “little genius” in Chinese, IMOO focuses on producing smart devices for children. According to industry-analysis reports, the domestic kids’ smartwatch market in China has doubAccording to industry-analysis reports, China’s domestic market for kids’ smartwatches grew twofold between 2019 and 2022 (Asia Financial, 2022); moreover, China held a dominant position in the global kids’ smartwatch market, accounting for 62% of global shipments in 2019 (Counterpoint, 2020). IMOO occupies the largest market share in China’s kids’ smartwatch market compared to other Chinese tech giants such as Huawei or Xiaomi, which also produce smartwatches for children (Counterpoint, 2023). The silent but dominant growth of IMOO has been accompanied by ideologically-infused sales discourses about safety, parenting, and data-based surveillance.
The concept of the “quantified child” refers to the technological monitoring of children’s daily activities that generate detailed data about them (Lupton & Williamson, 2017; Mascheroni & Holloway, 2019; Smith, 2017; Willson, 2019). Accompanying this trend is the assumption that data becomes “a regular currency for citizens to pay for [convenient] communication services” (van Dijck, 2014, p. 197-198); in this case, children are framed as promising data objects who can be molded into “future citizens and desiring consumers.” (Willson, 2019, p. 634) The functions of IMOO kids’ smartwatches illustrate a definition of the “quantified child.” For example, beyond the basic function of phone calls or video calls between children and their parents, smartwatches also include features such as real-time location tracking, heart-rate, and body-temperature monitoring, and even emotion recognition. Considering these features together, a major selling point for kids’ smartwatches is that they will help parents protect and care for their children and ensure a happy childhood.
However, the ways that technology industries and other stakeholders collect, process, and monetize data remain a black box, in fact leading to social problems that contribute to what Shoshana Zuboff has termed “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2019). Monetizing children’s precious, even “priceless” (Zelizer, 1994) status in modern society makes the topic of dataveillance of children particularly relevant in academic and public discussions. Despite the promise of empowering and protecting children, kids’ smartwatches ironically place Chinese children at center of emerging and unknown risks as more data about and from them enters the technology industry’s fast market expansion. In the “315 Evening Gala” in 2022, which coincides with World Consumer Rights Day on March 15, China Media Group exposed specific problems deriving from kids’ smartwatches, including location data leakage and camera and microphone hacking (CGTN, 2022). The reciprocal or symbiotic relation between the market and the party-state in China’s Internet control (Hou, 2020) adds more complexities to the consequences of this surveillance technology’s market expansion, especially in areas such as public opinion monitoring (Hou, 2017) or sentiment analysis (Wu, 2020), two specific projects on which government agencies have been collaborating with big data companies.
In particular, I am drawing on two groups of literature: the modernization of childhood—with a focus on relations between children, mothers, commercial culture, and media technologies—and feminist surveillance studies. I situate the paper’s central concept of the “quantified child” alongside the work of scholars such as Deborah Lupton, Ben Williamson, and Michele Willson. As a research method I employ critical discourse analysis, which uncovers political-economic and gendered power dynamics in the production of advertising texts (Fairclough, 2013). The resulting analysis of kids’ smartwatch advertisements articulates how IMOO commercial discourse depicts three layers of surveillance embedded in children’s everyday use of smartwatches—intimate surveillance, self-surveillance, and social surveillance—as identified by Lupton and Williamson (2017). Overall, I argue that IMOO kids’ smartwatches gain success in the heteropatriarchal technology market in China that has been promoting surveillance culture by pandering to mothers’ desire and the imperative to care for their children, consolidating fathers’ domestic masculinity as breadwinners, and enforcing gendered discipline of girls. Finally, I consider the implications of this study for understanding children, gender, and everyday surveillance in Chinese society and beyond.
Literature review
- Modernization of childhood, commercial culture, and media
The meaning of “child” or the idea of “valuing children” is socially constructed and shaped by the larger trends of modernization. In the Middle Ages, children in the West were perceived as adults on a small scale (Cunningham, 2005). It was in fact quite common for children to work as laborers or be exposed to topics of a mature nature, like sex (Ariès, 1962). However, a shift in adults’ conceptualization of children took place from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, in large part due to the development of industrialization, compulsory education, and the primacy of the nuclear family (Ariès, 1962; Cunningham, 2005). Children became economically worthless and emotionally priceless as their unique personalities and abilities were increasingly valued by parents in heterosexual families with gendered divisions of labor (Zelizer, 1994; May, 1988; de la Parra Fernández, 2021). On the other hand, the growth of commercial culture also played a significant role in the conceptualization of children. Along with celebrating children’s uniqueness, advertisers gradually discovered children’s potential for exchange value; in particular, they could be used as a symbol in advertising that targeted parents. For example, advertisers produced clubs to “bond children in exclusive brand communities” (Asquith, 2014, p. 29) to promote brand loyalty. Children, positioned as consumers with free agency, could further influence family purchases (Jacobson, 2004). Cross (2010) argues that children’s consumption should be regarded as “valves of adult desires” (p. 17) and understood in dynamic association with the parent/child relationships; In this context, adults would view children as either “innocents who must be protected from the market” (p. 18) or “recipients of parental love through consumer spending” (p. 18).
The emphasis on treasuring children in contemporary Chinese society is also inseparable from the modernization and economic transformation that took place in the twentieth century. Historically, filial piety, or the idea that children are subordinate minors who unconditionally follow the directives of their elders, had long ruled the Chinese view of children (Liu, 2016). This idea is accompanied by preference for sons especially in rural society, where sons are entitled to stay with their parents and inherit family property yet daughters become outsiders to their natal families upon marriage (Feldman et al., 2007). In the 1920s, with the rapid spread of democratic and European scientific thought in Republican China, the centrality of children started to “both underwrite and [be] underwritten by a new culture industry that depends on the children’s market as a major source of revenue” (Jones, 2002, p. 709). The idea of valuing children became more closely associated with the market and commercial culture after China’s economic liberalization in the 1980s. The one-child policy launched in the same period further focused families’ resources on the development and well-being of their only child. This trend has implications for many aspects of Chinese social life, including marketing, given that more families are devoting time and resources to optimize their children’s opportunities in life (Meng, 2020) at the same time that children can influence family consumption by making demands on their parents (Westwood, 2013). As a result, Chinese parents, especially middle-class mothers, have been increasingly encouraged to privilege childrearing and take on more labor in both traditional and digital parenting (Peng, 2022; Zhang, Sun, & Ding, 2023).
In regard to media, Neil Postman (1982) made a famous claim in that television leads to the disappearance of childhood because it eliminates the distinctions between childhood and adulthood: “it is in its nature to homogenize mentalities” (p. 118). Television especially does this by showing emotive visual imagery that does not require any logical analysis (e.g., in animated comic strips, soap operas, news shows). Postman’s arguments echo common social concerns or “moral panics” about children’ media use. Besides television, comic books, video games, and the Internet have been regarded as threatening youth (e.g., Barker, 1984; Szablewicz, 2010), due to such problems as violent media content and potential addiction. Such moral panics, though criticized as “unreasonably extrapolating from particular instances of (mis)behavior to a larger threat” (Condis & Stanfill, 2011, p. 971), then justify parental or institutional interventions in children’s media use. Recent research notices that smart devices for children appeal to parental desires to be good parents and raise the ideal child (Willson, 2019). CCTV cameras at home (Liu, 2024), child-rearing robots (Yuan & Zhu, 2021), smart lamps (Lim & Wang, 2024), and kids’ smartwatches are several examples in contemporary Chinese society. Scholarly discussions have paid attention to how these technologies shape familial relationships and gendered inequalities in parenting, yet the privacy and surveillance issues involved in these interventions into childhood are largely neglected.
- Situating the “quantified child” in feminist surveillance studies
The central concept of this paper, the quantified child, refers to a modern trend whereby children become the objects of monitoring devices that track their data in everyday technological interactions (Lupton & Williamson, 2017; Mascheroni & Holloway, 2019; Smith, 2017; Willson, 2019). The popularity of wearable technologies designed for children, such as kids’ smartwatches and fitbits, along with parental sharing of children’s (ultrasound) photos and school analytics, all lead to the datafication of children’s everyday lives from in utero through to the school years (Mascheroni & Holloway, 2019). Subtly different from a similar concept of ‘the quantified self,’ which refers to people using technologies to receive data about themselves through self-tracking (De Moya & Pallud, 2020), the quantified child implies that children are seldom regarded as “responsible agents” (p. 628) as “the management of their well-being is transferred in large part to parents, society, and the state” (Willson, 2019, p. 628). While companies promote monitoring devices as useful tools to keep children safe and assist good parenting (Simpson, 2014), scholars, regulators, and news media have criticized practices related to the quantified child for bringing potential risks of surveillance to children’s privacy both online and offline. For instance, the German Telecoms regulator banned kids’ smartwatches in 2017 out of worries about privacy invasion in GPS tracking and listening functions (BBC, 2017). Moreover, researchers such as Lupton and Williamson (2017) have been concerned about the trend that continuing dataveillance displaces children’s voices and participation in protecting their digital rights.
In this study, I take up feminist surveillance studies as an analytic for tracking the construction of the quantified child by IMOO smartwatches. According to Dubrofsky and Magnet (2015), feminist surveillance studies employ an intersectional critical feminist approach to interrogate “what constitutes surveillance, who is scrutinized, why, and at what cost” (p. 15) in relation to social inequalities and discrimination. I adopt the theoretical perspective of feminist surveillance studies in my research for two primary reasons. First, according to Gill (2019), surveillance is a feminist issue in that it is shaped by “a sensibility in which extracting and producing value from the body is central” (p. 158). Connecting feminist media studies’ work on bodies and “the politics of looking” (p. 10) to surveillance scholarship, Dubrofsky and Magnet (2015) highlight surveillance studies’ growing attention to the “data body” especially among vulnerable communities (see, for example, Puar, 2007). In the case of kids’ smartwatches, children’s biological information is a major source for data collection and exploitation. On top of that, surveillance relates to systematic discrimination and discipline in that it always “[classify] some bodies as normative and legal, and some as illegal and out of bounds” (Nakamura, 2015, p. 221), raising questions into the work of norms (e.g., gender norms) in heteronormative surveillance practices (Kafer & Grinberg, 2019). Second, as I will show in the analysis, discourse often used to rationalize surveillance in kids’ smartwatches includes “care for the kids.” However, feminist researchers have long critiqued cultural and material constructions of “care” as unpaid or underpaid women’s work that is emotionally oriented (Abu-Laban, 2015). It is thus necessary to tease out the logic of power and control masked by “care” discourse that often includes assumptions about mothers’ roles in engaging in practices of surveillance framed as necessary to maintain children’s safety. Taken together, the perspective of feminist surveillance studies guides me to interrogate both the gendered regime of parental care and the gendered discipline of girls implied in IMOO’s advertising.
Research data and methods
The empirical basis for my research was 16 advertising videos released for IMOO from 2015, when the brand launched its first kids’ smartwatch, to 2022. To search for IMOO’s commercials, I employed purposive sampling and searched mainstream video platforms for keywords (in Chinese) including “IMOO kids’ smartwatches”, “IMOO”, and “advertising of kids’ smartwatches”. After excluding videos with duplicate content, I obtained 16 commercials for IMOO kids’ smartwatches.[1] To contextualize my analysis, I also referred to news pieces, leaflets, and public documents that discussed the brand. These supporting materials allowed me to study the political-economic dynamics and integrative marketing and branding strategies behind the advertising texts.
I then conducted a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the 16 advertising videos. I took extensive notes of both verbal and visual materials, including the words that appeared in advertising as well as the visual images, including the characters’ appearance and behavior. I follow Fairclough’s (2013) approach to CDA, which regards discourses as constituted by “social practice, discoursal practice (text production, distribution and consumption), and texts” (p. 59); furthermore, CDA examines their interrelations in the working of “power differences and inequalities” (p. 26) that contributes to the production of ideology. In this way, I analyzed details in the advertisements such as narrative structures and interrelations between verbal and visual symbols. At the same time, I explored the socio-economic contexts related to the making and storytelling of the commercials of IMOO kids’ smartwatches.
Locating my methodology within feminist media studies, I conducted a close reading of IMOO’s advertising texts to examine how discursive practices in the brand’s commercials relate to heteropatriarchal culture and the political economy in contemporary China. With a select sample of advertising texts, my research findings are exploratory rather than definitive. Despite this, I expect the present study to enrich discussions about everyday surveillance in China from a feminist perspective.
Analysis
- An ideal technology for “good parents”
Emerging technologies promise to act as caring media (Gibson, Hjorth, & Choi, 2021), enabling people to practice social support in intimate contexts within their daily lives. Accordingly, companies often market smart devices for children as helpful assistants for good parenting. For instance, one frequently mentioned slogan in several IMOO advertisements is that “no matter where you are, I am just a call away”. Video calling and real-time location tracking are the main functions of IMOO kids’ smartwatches, satisfying the parents’ desire to carefully monitor their children at all times even if this is potentially invasive (Leaver, 2017). Additionally, IMOO’s advertising includes assumptions about mothers’ roles in practicing surveillance, posed as necessary to ensure children’s safety. For instance, in IMOO’s ads—either in videos or on its website—there are common scenarios where mothers actively track their children’s locations with a mobile phone map or through video calling. In contrast, very few of IMOO’s advertisements touch upon father or fatherhood. In one ad, although the father seldom spends time with his daughter, even missing her birthday, he claims to be a “model dad” after giving his daughter a kids’ smartwatch as a gift. Taken together, by presenting motherhood and fatherhood differently, IMOO’s commercials highlight gender hierarchies in parenting which require mothers to always be around and care for children while rationalizing the absence of fathers.
It is also worth noting that the features of IMOO kids’ smartwatches are largely simplified. For instance, a 2016 advertising video states, “With a kids’ smartwatch, children can make calls and show locations; a kids’ smartwatch has no games and is waterproof, making it more convenient than any cell phone”. Marketing themselves as a stopgap cellphone for kids, IMOO kids’ smartwatches assure parents that they need not worry about their children’s Internet addiction, reinforce parental control over their children’s technology use, and thus successfully become an ideal technology for “good parents.”
However, being a good parent is not just offered by the affordances for monitoring children’ safety or deliberately not offering video game entertainment. Rather, IMOO’s advertising reinforces the idea that parental tracking of children’ real-time location with a mobile phone map is a form of “intimate surveillance” (Lupton & Williamson, 2017). Although kids’ smartwatches promote an idealized image of dedicated parents, in fact data collection, processing, and even exploitation occur constantly in digitized parental care. For example, one IMOO leaflet claims to provide “‘accurate location tracking, mood recognition, heart rate monitoring, temperature monitoring, wear recognition, and behavioral status’…Six dimensions let you know where your child is, what they are doing, and how they are feeling.” This promotion recalls other products on the market, such as a smart lamp for detecting children’s poor posture (Lim & Wang, 2024) or the so-called “smart classroom behavior management system” for monitoring students’ attentiveness (SCMP, 2018). While the features of children’s smartwatches seem powerful, all quantification and prediction practices are based on behavioral or biological data generated by children in real time and thus raise concerns about children’s data security (Mascheroni & Holloway, 2019). IMOO’s ads only show the advantages of the “quantified child” for parenting while never explaining how children’s privacy will be protected. These products are introducing surveillance capitalism as a constitutive part of children’s lifecycles without their knowledge.
Advertising targeted at children also reveals adult cultural norms and consumption attitudes. While IMOO’s ads as a whole appeal to parental care for their children, a 2019 advertising video that explains the technical architecture of kids’ smartwatches more clearly targets adults as the audience. This ad depicts the production process of kids’ smartwatches in a factory, with technical terms such as “1.41-inch retina screen,” “Qualcomm Snapdragon processor,” and “silicon anode batteries.” The use of specialized technical concepts suggests that the ad does not intend to make children understand the smartwatches’ functions but rather to convince parents that IMOO technology is effective and advanced. In this way, IMOO kids’ smartwatch advertising also satisfies the adult parents’ desire to consume digital products that are constantly being updated.
- Assuring children’ autonomy in purchasing and using smartwatches
A traditional conception of children as unable to control their emotions and lacking rational thought culturally distinguishes children from adults, giving rise to the idea that children must be protected. However, the consumer culture promoted by IMOO’s commercials tends to celebrate children’s autonomy and sense of self. “Choice” is an important part of marketing discourse. Here it is used to assert children’s “consumer citizenship” (Banet-Weiser, 2007), as the idea of “choice” appears to empower children to make purchase decisions across a wide range of products. As we will see, choice—as a value in and of itself—is woven into IMOO marketing discourse and is indelibly tied to the idea of self-surveillance.
For example, two of IMOO’s ads are co-branded with movies popular among children—Transformers and Spider-Man—encouraging children to purchase customized versions of kids’ smartwatches based on their preferences for cartoon characters. The emphasis on children’s choices in these ads stimulates children’s spending power in the market. While asserting children’s sense of self, IMOO’s ads also portray children as having a significant impact on family purchases (Jacobson, 2004). IMOO’s ads screened on Children’s Day or Chinese New Year include these questions: “Mom, the holiday is coming. Where is the surprise you said you would give me? You didn’t forget it, right? I did very well in my exams, what is the reward?”. Of course, kids’ smartwatches show up in IMOO’s ads as the only gift children want: children who get smartwatches are excited, while those who don’t get them are disappointed.
Meanwhile, the functions of kids’ smartwatches perversely connect the autonomy of the consumer child to their self-surveillance while using it. Unlike surveillance undertaken by ‘others,’ self-surveillance emerges as an apparently helpful means for people to exercise self-control, self-tracking, or engage in self-improvement (Lupton & Williamson, 2017; Gill, 2019; De Moya & Pallud, 2020). In IMOO’s advertisements, smartwatches provide children with joy and a sense of reassurance through datafication. For example, children in the ads actively show their real-time locations or happily say “yay” to the smartwatch camera. Further, such depictions are deeply gendered, portraying girls as benefitting the most under self-surveillance. For instance, ads often tie girls’ uses of smartwatches with a scenario that a girl is leaving home, as mothers tell them to be sure to bring their smartwatches with them to stay safe. However, images of boys using kids’ smartwatches are often associated with engaging in sports or DIY projects. Such gendered advertising perpetuate hetero-patriarchal social norms, such as women’s submissive social roles in male/female hierarchies (Valdes, 1996) or gadget culture or technical specifications as expressions of masculinity (Ammari, Schoenebeck, & Lindtner, 2017).
News about technology for children in China have reported that kids’ smartwatches lack advanced privacy protection mechanisms, so they can easily leak children’s location, photos, and other private data (e.g., CGTN, 2017, 2022; SCMP, 2019). However, in IMOO’s ads, children wearing IMOO smartwatches are always depicted as happy and are never portrayed as individuals who might voice opposition to dataveillance. Indeed, IMOO never tells children and their parents in the ads how kids’ smartwatches will process and store data extracted from children’s bodies and daily behaviors. But the brand’s trick of monetizing and exploiting children’s digital data is not totally untraceable. For example, IMOO describes on its official website that it is open to partnerships with other Chinese digital platforms (such as the music platform NetEase Music and the mobile payment platform Alipay), as the massive number of high-quality IMOO kids’ smartwatch users gives the brand a strong advantage in terms of traffic distribution (IMOO, n.d.). Moreover, IMOO has also written in its product privacy policy that it will collect and use user’s personal information without prior consent in cases directly related to national security, national defense, public safety, public health, significant public interest, etc., or share such data with administrative and judicial agencies for specific investigative purposes (IMOO, 2022). Finally, although the news has reported that kids’ smartwatches are vulnerable to hacking for cyber-criminal purposes, IMOO is silent on measures to ensure the security of children’s data in kids’ smartwatches. All of these factors indicate that the technology industry and government agencies use children’s personal data to upgrade products, make profits, and expand nationwide everyday surveillance.
- With IMOO, children become good friends
In using monitoring devices, users are not just self-tracking but often revealing personal information online as a way to present themselves and foster social connections (Lupton & Williamson, 2017; Marwick, 2012). The latter activity exemplifies “social surveillance” when considering the quantified child. IMOO kids’ smartwatches have a special function to add friends; that is, a child can simply touch his or her IMOO smartwatch to others’. Based on this function, IMOO’s commercials state, “You have a smartwatch, I have a smartwatch, then we become good friends”. By engendering feelings of exclusivity and enjoyment in peer groups, IMOO effectively forms a club for children who use IMOO smartwatches, cultivating brand loyalty among the children who then continuously generate data for IMOO’s expansion into their daily activities and interactions.
Besides the function of “adding friends,” IMOO’s kids’ smartwatches also come with a pedometer. The pedometer is not only used to encourage children to do physical exercise but also has an explicitly social function. Specifically, IMOO’s advertising films a girl asking her male friend to walk together, with the slogan, “You are my friend. Good friends walk together.” On top of that, the ad also features children comparing their daily steps or giving each other’s steps a “like” using the smartwatches. According to Marwick (2012), social surveillance not only helps maintain intimacy among friends but formulates norms that define what is appropriate or inappropriate behavior. By encouraging children to share personal data in heteronormative interactions via smart devices, IMOO’s advertising helps normalize dataveillance by digital platforms and incorporates children as data subjects for future profiting in China’s digital economy.
Because it creates a restriction that only children who use IMOO smartwatches can add friends and interact with each other, IMOO also motivates parents to buy IMOO smartwatches so their children won’t be ostracized by peers. Further, narratives in IMOO’s advertising imply that consuming IMOO kids’ smartwatches leads to both children’s and parents’ upward mobility or greater social status. For instance, multiple ads are set in middle-class families with images of several children with children’s smartwatches skateboarding, playing hockey, or going on field trips, seemingly eliminating class differences or differences in family economic levels. This kind of depiction also accelerates the gendered regime of care work because mothers currently assume more labor for digital parenting—that is, labor such as seeking child-rearing information, using education services online, or monitoring children’s activities (Peng, 2022).
Discussion and conclusion
A feminist perspective further guided me to reflect on the power relations woven into the everyday surveillance enabled by kids’ smartwatches. For one thing, the childcare mediated by kids’ smartwatches was framed as only the mothers’ responsibilities—no matter if they are at work or not. The fathers’ occasional involvement in, and often absence from, parenting is portrayed as acceptable, and the role of public services in ensuring the (data) safety of children is never interrogated. Additionally, the ads more often promoted girls as consumers and beneficiaries of surveillance technologies, maintaining hetero-patriarchal social norms through which the powerful states and corporations exercise their benevolent yet masculine control over women and other disadvantaged groups via abstract data extraction in the name of care (Abu-Laban, 2015). As the centrality of children in modernization has emphasized values such as empowerment and protection, the public commonly holds the belief that parents ought to interfere with children’s media use. While such interference may benefit children by preventing them from the harm brought on by the overconsumption of technology, parental care for children also provides a “good reason” in tech companies’ commercials to sugarcoat their surveillance activities for profits, ultimately conferring risks to children’s digital rights.
Moreover, the rapid market expansion of kids’ smartwatches in China could be understood in connection with the current national social-political dynamics, primarily the decline in national population along with increased parental stress. It has been commonly observed, particularly in anti-terrorism contexts such as school surveillance in the United States, that producers of security equipment cultivate perceived risks in order to maintain a huge market for their products (Taylor, 2017). In the case of the present study, the promotion of kids’ smartwatches as a typical surveillance technology in China adopts and employs a similar strategy: by generating and promoting a culture of parental stress; in that case, the kids’ smartwatches market themselves as helpful assistants in child care. As discourse surrounding kids’ smartwatches echoes the development of China’s population policy, such as the three-child policy, the expansion of the smartwatches has been boosted with the support of Chinese state capitalism, in which the Chinese party-state actively collaborates with the private sector whilst maintaining its political control (Huang & Tsai, 2022). Indeed, IMOO has been developing partnerships with the state-controlled telecommunication industry to expand sales channels.
We can also think about the rise of IMOO kids’ smartwatches along with the exercise of surveillance more broadly and China’s global leadership in AI. Specifically, the focus on caring for children in IMOO’s commercials is accompanied by themes of the gendered regime of parental care and the gendered discipline of girls in Chinese middle-class families, exemplifying a standard form of gendered and ethnonationalist citizenship that positions the child as the central subject. A similar logic of surveillance is embedded within broader datafied social management in China. Examples include the construction of social credit systems that aim at quantifying citizens’ behaviors to combat individualism (Liu & Rona-Tas, 2024), and the development of settler colonialism in Xinjiang that enforces ethno-racial policing of Uyghur men for capitalist accumulation (Byler, 2021). AI surveillance technologies are among those technologies exported to governments of countries along the Digital Silk Road (Feldstein, 2019). In a geopolitical sense, China’s export of digital technologies and infrastructures to these countries contributes to China’s increasing power in global Internet governance (Shen, 2018). Compared to common surveillance technologies such as surveillance cameras installed in public spaces, devices such as kids’ smartwatches that are usually applied in families or intimate scenarios deserve further examination.
Two major questions remain unresolved in my study. First, while I teased out the complicated relations between the market and the Chinese party-state in everyday surveillance, as embodied in the case of kids’ smartwatches, I was not able to gain sufficient supporting materials, especially policy documents, to uncover more details. Second, while IMOO mainly relies on the Chinese market for now, it also has export businesses[2] and has been developing overseas markets in Southeast Asia since the beginning of 2019 (CNMO, 2017). Future research can further explore the implications of China’s export of AI surveillance technologies in terms of not only transnational capitalist accumulation and exploitations but connections between the global rise of surveillance and right-wing politics, Chinese transnational control of telecommunication infrastructures, and cross-cultural effects of modifying social ideas about parenting and privacy.
Notes
Acknowledgments: I thank the anonymous reviewer, section editor Gary Kafer, and editor Julia Lesage for constructive comments and editing. I am also thankful to Andrea Miller, Matt McAllister, Cindy Lin, and participants in the Data Studies Group at Penn State and the Chinese Feminism Conference at the New School for Social Research for their invaluable suggestions on early drafts of this article.
1. For the links to the 16 advertising videos, please see: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nGLUTJ5MscxPxixH7uL0BjALxjnQ
Dz2ucggrHTf6xVk/edit?usp=sharing
2. Please see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH6wgrIrBnc
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