Child's play: Coding booms among Chinese children

Wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a red T-shirt, an eight-year-old Chinese boy is logged in for an online coding lesson -- as the teacher. Vita has set up a coding tutorial channel on the Chinese video streaming site Bilibili since August and has so far garnered nearly 60,000 followers and over one million views. He is among a growing number of children in China who are learning coding even before they enter primary school. The trend has been fuelled by parents' belief that coding skills will be essential for Chinese teenagers given the government's technological drive. 'Coding's not that easy but also not that difficult -- at least not as difficult as you have imagined,' says Vita, who lives in Shanghai.