CHANGSHA, China - Inside a fishing gear store on a busy city street, the owner sits behind a counter, furiously tapping a smartphone to improve his score on an app that has nothing to do with rods, reels and bait.
While many people have embraced the app as a form of patriotism, others see it as a burden imposed by overzealous officials and another sign of a growing personality cult around Mr Xi, perhaps China's most powerful leader since Mao's time. Schools are shaming students with low app scores. Government offices are holding study sessions and forcing workers who fall behind to write reports criticising themselves. Private companies, hoping to curry favour with party officials, are ranking employees based on their use of the app and awarding top performers the title of"star learner." Many employers now require workers to submit daily screenshots documenting how many points they have earned.
"There is no national security without Internet security," Mr Xi said in a speech this year."If we cannot succeed on the internet, we will not be able to maintain power in the long run." At Hulunbuir University in northern China, school officials monitor the scores of more than 1,100 teachers and students who use the app as part of the school's efforts to spread Mr Xi's ideas, known in China as Xi Jinping Thought.
Critics say Mr Xi is intruding into the private lives of Chinese citizens in a way the party has typically avoided since the Mao era. The app makes the party's messages difficult to ignore, awarding points only when an article has been read completely and a video has been watched for at least three minutes.
The Propaganda Department declined to comment, as did Alibaba, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
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