The Menu State: When Your Money Can Only Buy What Power Allows

By Naomi Ellridge

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A man ends a long week and opens his phone the way people in normal countries open a door. He wants to play what his friends in Seoul and Tokyo are talking about. He has the money. He has the time. He has the desire.

And yet the door does not open.

This is not poverty. This is not "the market decided." It is something more specific: a life in which spending is not merely private but conditional—where the simplest question ("What do I want to do with the proceeds of my labor?") has an invisible second question attached to it ("What am I allowed to want at scale?").

China's game approval system—the banhao publishing license—looks like a narrow industry detail if you treat it as a gaming policy. It becomes far more revealing if you treat it as political theory in practical form. It is not merely a content filter. It is a claim about disposal rights: who controls the endpoints of income and attention—what money can lawfully become, and what kinds of narrative environments people are permitted to inhabit in bulk.

To see why this matters, we need a concept modern societies pretend is obvious but permission-states never accept: money is not only a medium of exchange. It is conversion power. It lets human beings turn time into shelter, labor into education, risk into opportunity, and boredom into meaning. When conversion is constrained—not by price, but by permission—the state is not merely regulating markets. It is defining the boundary of adulthood.

Money as conversion power

In civics-class fantasy, the story is clean: you earn; you choose; you buy; the market responds. Even where the state intervenes, the default assumption is that your income belongs to you and your preferences—taste, curiosity, identity—are private.

In the permission-first state, the default is inverted. Your income exists inside a political enclosure. The question is never simply "Can you afford it?" but "Is it a permitted conversion?" You may have cash in hand, yet the set of legitimate endpoints is still externally defined.

This is where games become instructive.

Banhao is a gate, not a rating

Many countries regulate games. Some rate them. Some restrict minors. Some punish fraud or harm after the fact. China's system operates on a different axis: a game becomes a lawful mass product only after the state grants it the right to exist as commercial "publishable culture" inside the domestic market.

Industry descriptions state the reality plainly: games need official approval from the National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA) in the form of a game license—banhao—before being published on official platforms for the domestic market.

The crucial point is not the bureaucratic acronym. It is the structure: there is a gate, the gate precedes the market, and the gate can be tightened or loosened as politics shifts. A "market" that exists downstream from a permission switch is not a market in the classical sense. It is a managed allocation.

In this system, the state is not only judging content. It is defining what kinds of pleasure can be widely purchased, what kinds of imaginative worlds can be broadly inhabited, and what kinds of communities can be formed at scale.

Why games matter to sovereign power

Games are not only entertainment. They are immersion machines (attention), community engines (association), narrative environments (moral intuition), and systems laboratories (incentives and cooperation). If you are building a society in which autonomous association is politically dangerous, games are never just games. They are rehearsal spaces for non-state loyalties.

A regime that depends on narrative primacy will treat high-immersion media as strategic terrain. Not because every game is "subversive," but because the medium produces habits—cooperation, identity-play, informal organization—that become difficult to police once they scale.

The banhao system turns that instinct into an enforceable rule: lawful scale requires permission.

The same logic appears in finance

Once you recognize banhao as a gate over conversion power, you start seeing the same design elsewhere. Consider foreign exchange restrictions. China operates an individual quota framework widely reflected in regulator and bank materials: an annual quota equivalent to USD 50,000 for individual foreign exchange purchases, with policy detail and enforcement that can vary by purpose and documentation.

Again, the point is not whether the number is "high" or "low." The structural point is: the state reserves the right to define how much of your domestic earnings can become foreign currency, and by extension how smoothly your wealth can become offshore securities, foreign property, or simply an exit option.

Where demand exists, it is frequently directed into approved conduits—offshore exposure through licensed pipes rather than free capital movement. The QDII mechanism is commonly described as a government-approved route allowing qualified institutions to invest in foreign markets, providing limited offshore access through authorized channels.

So you get the same architecture as banhao: • you may access "outside" things, • but through approved pipes, • under quotas and rulebooks that can be adjusted, • with visibility and traceability.

This is not only economics. It is sovereignty design.

One model, two doors: the Menu State

Put these two domains together—games and offshore access—and a coherent model emerges. Call it the Menu State.

In the Menu State, the citizen is not a full owner of conversion power. He is a permitted converter. He can choose, but only among state-defined options. The state does not need to confiscate every decision; it needs to define the boundaries of legitimate exchange.

This is why the intuitive image—"even the soup must stay in the house"—lands so well. Modern authoritarianism does not rely primarily on starving people. It relies on enclosing endpoints: the places your money and attention are allowed to go.

You may earn from global trade, but the end uses of that income—what it can become—remain domesticated. It is an ownership claim without a property deed: the claim that social energy, attention, and wealth are ultimately components of the ruling system's portfolio.

The business of permission

Once a gate exists, it produces predictable secondary effects.

It creates compliance rents: companies learn that success is not just product quality but political legibility. It creates scarcity as leverage: approvals can slow, speed, or concentrate, shaping an industry by administrative rhythm. It trains a society to treat autonomy as a favor: people stop asking "Why can't I buy this?" and start asking "How do I qualify to buy what is allowed?"

That psychological pivot is the quiet victory: desire translated into permission.

The cultural cost: a population raised on the allowable

This is not simply about missing a few titles. A permission-first culture weakens independent taste. When people cannot freely access a broad range of narrative environments—global genres, unfamiliar moral architectures, experimental subcultures—they become easier to predict and easier to steer.

This is not an argument for Western worship. It is an argument for diversity of inputs as a condition for mental sovereignty. A person who has lived in many fictional worlds is harder to govern with a single official one.

So the Menu State does something more subtle than "censor." It manages the public's emotional diet—what kinds of longing are rehearsed, what kinds of heroism are normalized, what kinds of tragedy are allowed to feel real.

Over decades, the costs accumulate: creativity becomes risk management; innovation becomes permission seeking; subculture becomes camouflage; escape becomes financial engineering. When escape becomes a technical problem rather than a moral right, the enclosure is working.

A Pan-Asian comparison without fairy tales

A Pan-Asian observer should resist a lazy binary: "China controls, the West is free." That is propaganda in reverse. The useful distinction is institutional: whether desire is presumed private or presumed administrable; whether controls are emergency tools or permanent sovereignty architecture.

This is why banhao feels ideologically loud even when it is discussed in quiet bureaucratic language. It is the state saying: the story worlds you inhabit at scale will be the ones we recognize.

The real conflict is the right to choose endpoints

Arguments about individual approvals miss the larger point. The real conflict is over conversion rights.

Does earning money entitle you to decide what you buy? Does curiosity entitle you to explore any world? Does building community entitle you to do so without administrative permission?

In the Menu State, the structural answer is: not fully.

The man at the beginning still has his money and his weekend. What he does not have—by default—is the basic modern promise money is supposed to represent: the right to convert his labor into the world he chooses to live in.

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