Allocating Responsibility for Underage Drinking

For reasons beyond anyone’s control, people send me Douyin links in chat. They think the video is worth watching, or they assume that I, on the other side of the screen, will open literally anything. Nobody used Douyin’s DMs, because almost nobody knows my username, and nobody should be — it’s not an app I open every day. Or rather, whoever you are, you shouldn’t be opening that app every day. Or better still, never open it at all. As for the video that friend shared, I trusted him enough to click. A female creator, early twenties, trying out — of course they all call it a review — a chili-flavored vodka. For the sake of the bit, she paired it with a lineup of spicy foods. It only looks like a clever move. I lost the desire to keep watching, the way I lose the desire for most things: fast. Except that I sat there staring at the watermark-sized disclaimer in the top left corner, barely holding back a sneer: Minors are prohibited from consuming alcohol.

The reality I’m familiar with is that minors in China are drinking like maniacs.

A thirteen-year-old friend sent me a photo one day. She’s lying in bed, camera aimed at a can of cocktail. The packaging colors are in perfect harmony with her nail art. Inside a deep pink circle on the can, a Chinese character for “alcohol” larger than her fingernail limply reminds the buyer that this is, in fact, alcohol. But probably in the interest of softening the product’s image, smaller text above it reads: 5% is just right. Lacking any context, I took this to mean just right for causing irreversible damage to the brain of a thirteen-year-old girl.

“This is real alcohol, you know,” I told her. Last time she posted the 2% version on WeChat Moments, I had already delivered, out of some unprompted goodwill, a full lecture on what alcohol does to a developing teen brain.

Her memory really isn’t great, but she should still remember that conversation.

“Whatever, I’m not in school anyway, and it’s only 5%,” she replied, unbothered.

A sixteen-year-old friend told me she can’t say no to foreign liquor. The photo she sent was a twenty-five-year Scotch single malt. No wonder her moods swing that hard every day, I thought — she’d taken more than fifty days off over the course of one semester. Recently she sent a photo of a late-night snack at home, the head on the beer in front of her still not settled.

“You can scan this beer for cash. I scanned two bottles, got 3.88 twice already.”

I said, alcohol, the more you drink it the easier it is to feel bad.

She said: “It helps me sleep.”

Walking around my compound I got thirsty and went into a convenience store for water. Ten at night. Two middle school girls sitting side by side at a square table inside, sharing a fairly large can of cocktail. They’d only just started, but their faces were already as red as everyone we describe as a lightweight. I’m not sure the liver is the most important organ in the body, but it can be transplanted. The brain can’t, especially the prefrontal cortex.

The friend about to start college often wants to order a beer when we eat together. I asked. Sure enough, several years of drinking behind him.

I swallowed, with everything I had, the sentence in my mouth: no wonder you have no patience for anything. A reCAPTCHA window takes one second to load and he’s already clawing at his ears, ready to smash the computer.

Considering that parts of these minors’ brains haven’t finished growing (and definitely won’t, now that they’re drinking), and considering how brutally hard their lives already are — or maybe I’m just taking their side for no reason — the responsibility for failing to resist a bad temptation shouldn’t fall on them. Sound-minded parents should bear primary responsibility for underage drinking.

My proposal: once a minor is found drinking, the parents must be banned from alcohol for 180 days and fitted with a specialized electronic ankle monitor. Any alcohol detected in the blood, 5,000 yuan fine. During this period, forget it — not your smug little nightcap, not your career-critical business dinners. If it was Huoxiang Zhengqi Shui, that alcohol-laced traditional remedy for a bad stomach, produce the pharmacy receipt.

If underage drinking occurs on school grounds or within 300 meters of them, the school is placed on a mandatory three-day sobriety break, though the ones who were drinking should still come in for self-study or to clean the entire campus. Given that the principal or the dean of students was in all likelihood at a drinking table the previous night — but it’s not that egregious, not like the head male nurse in the ER of a certain hospital who showed up to his midday shift drunk and got into a fight with a patient’s family in the resuscitation room — no additional penalty applies. They’re only required to come to work as usual the next day and do the labor alongside the little drunks.

The biggest hole is out in the world. So if a convenience store is caught selling alcohol to a minor, the person who reports it receives every bottle in the store’s back room. If the reporter is themselves a minor, the stock will be distributed on the spot by law enforcement to passing citizens.

If a KTV or similar venue is found selling alcohol to minors, it immediately enters rectification proceedings and is forcibly converted into a tutoring center.

If a grocery delivery platform or a delivery rider discovers the recipient of an alcohol order is a minor, they may exercise the right to confiscate it on the spot and take it home to drink themselves. Disclaimer: do not drink while riding an e-scooter, do not ride an e-scooter after drinking, and do not, after being pulled over for drinking and riding, insist you haven’t had a drop and then fall into a flowerbed within three steps.

All minors caught drinking lose their summer vacation and are sent to the local distillery for summer labor practice. Anything you put in your mouth, you should probably learn a little about first.

What we actually need is not that going-through-the-motions disclaimer in the corner of the frame. If that sort of thing worked, might as well just ban minors from watching short videos altogether. If platforms feel that minors’ engagement and attention is a revenue stream they can’t give up, and if their recommendation algorithms are really as formidable as they claim, then at the very least they should make it impossible for a minor to ever be served content tied to these habits. For instance, someone chugging chili-flavored vodka straight into the camera.