MelegReiziger ✝️🟦

If you were a parent at some schools in Guizhou in southwest China in 2018, every time your child walked through the school gate, your phone would beep. You'd get a message with the precise time, and a 20-second video clip of your child walking past the guard room. The trick was the school uniform. Two chips were embedded in the fabric under the shoulders of an otherwise ordinary school tracksuit. If a student left the school without permission, the school gate would sound an alarm. The company that made the uniform, Guizhou Guanyu Technology, said it created it because children were disappearing. For another 290 yuan, about $42, parents could add a GPS tracker in the school badge that would track the child after school. A student at Renhuai Number 11, one of the first schools to use the uniform, told a reporter that everyone felt monitored. The student's parents joked, "Now if you wiggle your toes, I know." Li Daguo, the company's general manager, admitted later that the kids' dignity was "something we never considered at all." When a reporter called the education bureau in Renhuai, they didn't even know which schools had adopted the technology. They said choosing a uniform was up to the schools, not the bureau. Last month, China Education Daily, the newspaper run by the Ministry of Education, highlighted a high school in Qingdao, on the eastern coast, as a model case. There, the chip has been incorporated into the uniform program run by the city education bureau, tied to each student's ID. The article's line was, "The uniform is the ID card." One mother interviewed in the article said, "Now we can see on our phones exactly when he gets to school." In 2018, an education bureau said it wasn't responsible for uniforms. In 2026, another education bureau has incorporated the chip into its uniform program, and the ministry newspaper wrote this up as good news for parents. In eight years, the chip has gone from a startup trying to sell it to official practice, but the decision makers are still grown-ups: the parents who get the notifications, and now the government that runs the system.