China Successfully Uses Digital Surveillance to Fight COVID-19, But Should Not Set an Example for the World

A sign requiring customers to present their health code at a KFC in Beijing. Photo by N509FZ.

Last summer, an American friend who visited me in Beijing complained about how inconvenient it was to travel within Beijing as a foreigner: without providing a Chinese ID and bank account number, she couldn’t sign up for most smartphone apps that local residents use on a daily basis. She couldn’t sign up for Didi, China’s version of Uber, for example, and was forced to hail taxis in Beijing’s scorching sun. Neither was she able to sign up for Wechat Pay, a service that allows users to pay by simply scanning a QR code, and was forced to pay by cash. 

Now, another item has been added to China’s long list of ID-related essential smartphone services. In early February, China’s southern city of Hangzhou launched a digital code system meant to assist in controlling the spread of COVID-19. The mini-app—a project by the local government with the help of Ant Financial, a sister company of tech giant Alibaba—tracks the user’s travel history, identifying if they might have been exposed to COVID-19. 

To register for the service, the user must first complete an identity check by having their face scanned on their smartphone and filling in their ID and mobile number. Then, they will answer a series of questions related to their personal health and travel history. After finishing these steps, the user will be assigned a colored code, which determines whether they can be allowed to travel freely. 

The technology was rolled out nationally within two weeks. Each province now has their own version of the app, but generally, people given a green code are allowed to travel freely. A yellow code means that the user should be in home isolation, and a red code indicates that the user must be quarantined. 

The service, commonly known as “health code,” has now become an essential part of life in China. By the end of June, 29 million users had signed up for Beijing’s version of the app while the city itself has 21.5 million residents. This is understandable, given that it is almost impossible to enter the workplace, markets, or even one’s own residential compound without the app. 

From a public health perspective, few can deny the app’s utility in curbing the spread of COVID-19. Instead of relying on self-reporting and self-isolation to separate potential carriers of the coronavirus from the rest of the population, the app traces one’s travel and contact history through location-tracking technologies and presents that information to public health authorities. The main technique for tracking the user’s location relies on cooperation between the health code app and telecom operators: when the user’s mobile phone approaches a cell tower, the tower detects the mobile phone and sends it a signal indicating that it has entered a certain region. 

With the help of the app, China has largely put COVID-19 under control since its explosive outbreak in Wuhan in February, which triggered a nationwide lockdown. Starting from late April, the country’s daily increase in local confirmed cases have mostly remained below 50, sometimes dropping to single digits or no cases at all; occasional outbreaks were quickly contained through large-scale testing and quick contact tracing. 

Extraordinary times like this pandemic, however, have allowed governments around the world to push for increased levels of state control—Viktor Orban of Hungary and his party, Fidesz, consolidated power in the name of fighting the epidemic; Hong Kong’s government postponed parliamentary elections for a year, citing virus concerns; and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines threatened the use of martial law if citizens failed to follow social distancing rules. 

China’s upgrading of digital surveillance during the pandemic must be viewed in this context. Due to the pervasiveness of government-monitoring and lack of protection of personal data in China, the health code is yet another advancement in China’s ongoing construction of a surveillance state. 

China Mobile, a state-owned telecommunications operator. Photo by Henozuxj.

The App and the Questions It Raises about Privacy 

To be sure, the health code service has met with criticism domestically. But most critics focused on how the technology does not function the way it is supposed to. The app suffers occasional glitches: someone who is healthy might erroneously receive a red code, while someone infected might get a green code. Different provinces sometimes do not recognize each other’s version of the app. Older people who do not have smartphones or do not know how to use the app are confined to their own homes or villages. 

Yet, a more sinister problem has to do with the extent to which tech companies like Alipay and Wechat—and the government authorities that commissioned the app in the first place—gain access to citizens’ personal information. According to the New York Times, the app appears to share the information it collects with the police, including the user’s location, city name, and identification information. Reports from domestic media show that municipal governments and public security organs have been involved in the development of the app and preserve the information it collects. 

These facts raise questions about whether the government has the right to collect personal information from citizens and how the information collected by the health code service will be used in the future. Chinese journalist Cai Yineng, an editor at Sixth Tone, argues that the pandemic has “significantly expanded the scope of the de facto state of emergency we live in.” “The [health code] could easily be deployed in contexts where safety was previously taken as a given, forcing us to prove our innocuousness again and again,” he writes. “Now that everywhere and everyone is potentially unsafe, residential communities, coffee shops, and offices all feel justified making us prove our health status.” 

A recent proposal from the government of Hangzhou provides a hint of what the health code might be turned into: the city proposed to permanently assign each of its residents a colored health badge and rate them on a scale of 0-100 based on their medical records and lifestyle habits, which would include how much they exercised, their drinking and smoking habits, and how much they slept the night before. The proposal was met with strong criticism online, but the government did not respond directly to citizens’ concerns, stating merely that the proposal was still an idea and will not be implemented anytime soon. 

But smaller-scale upgrades of the app have already taken place. Zhejiang province, where Hangzhou is located, has begun to experiment with a “credit code” service, which rates the user’s credit standing through a similar tricolor code system as the health code—blue means “excellent,” green means “fine,” and yellow means “can be improved.” Those who have blue or green codes can enjoy discounts at hotels and tourist attractions. 

The southern city of Guangzhou has announced that its version of the health code can be used as a digital ID and might be required on public transit in the future. Other cities like Shanghai and Tianjin are also mulling over changing the app into a comprehensive platform upon which users can manage a wide variety of their daily activities. 

Neither government officials nor companies like Alipay or Tencent have explained in detail how the data collected by the health code app will be dealt with after the pandemic ends. Official explanations are often worded vaguely, like this one from state media Xinhua News Agency: 

The national standard of “Personal Health Information Code” fully considers the protection of personal privacy and sensitive information and regulates the collection, processing, and utilization of personal health information. The “health code” data is preserved by relevant departments, and the protection of personal information and data security will be strictly in accordance with the relevant regulations on personal information protection to prevent “data leakage” and prohibit any third-party platforms from retaining user data. 

According to Xiong Dingzhong, the chief partner at a law firm in Beijing and a faculty member of the prestigious Tsinghua University, there is no clear legal justification for how health code collects personal information—it is in fact against the national standards for data collection by mobile apps that he and other experts have been working on in recent years. Xiong thinks that data collected by the health code should be deleted after the pandemic. 

An Unprecedented Experiment in Social Control 

Before the pandemic, China had been monitoring its citizens for years through measures such as facial recognition, identity checkpoints in public spaces, and a requirement for users to register for online accounts and mobile phone services with their real names and ID numbers. The combination of a sweeping identity registration system and multiple forms of surveillance has enabled the city of Xiangyang, for example, to catch photos of jaywalkers and display them on a big, outdoor screen, alongside the lawbreakers’ names and ID numbers. 

Fare gates equipped with facial recognition technologies at Beijing West Railway Station. Photo by N509FZ.

China is also the world’s largest market for surveillance technologies. According to a report from IHS Markit, there are an estimated 415.8 million surveillance cameras in China, comprising more than half of the world’s total. Additionally, 18 among the top 20 most surveilled cities in the world are in China, although the country’s number of cameras per capita is only slightly above that of the United States. China is also a major exporter of surveillance technologies, accounting for nearly half of the global facial recognition business in 2018. 

In terms of innovation, a keyword search on worldwide patent database Espacene shows that 4,621 patents related to facial recognition and 641 related to camera and video surveillance were published in China in 2019 alone, compared to 263 and 92 respectively in the United States. China is also playing an active role in shaping international standards on surveillance in the United Nations.

The spectacular growth of surveillance technologies in China is enabled as much by the country’s booming tech industry as by its weak protection of citizens’ data privacy. As noted by Human Rights Watch in 2019: 

China does not have a unified privacy or data protection law to protect personally identifying information from misuse, especially by the government... In practice, there are no effective privacy protections against government surveillance. It is very difficult for citizens to know what personal information the government collects, and how the government uses, shares, or stores their data. 

China’s leading role in developing surveillance technologies and its unparalleled implementation of those technologies mean that it is engaging in an unprecedented experiment of technologically-enabled social control. 

The Darker Side 

While there is no denying that surveillance technologies are becoming essential during the COVID-19 pandemic, most notably for contact tracing purposes, China’s surveillance infrastructure is problematic when it is used to empower the government’s authoritarian tendencies. While the world marvels at China’s success in using technology to contain COVID-19, it must keep in mind the social and political context that enables the application of an app like the health code. 

Online surveillance is used by the Chinese government to crack down on dissent, for example. The “real name” requirement holds people accountable for their comments, discouraging them from criticizing the government online for fear of repercussions. It is not uncommon for citizens who post criticisms of the government online to be sacked or detained by the police, thanks to the link between their social media accounts and their real identities. Notably, multiple citizen journalists mysteriously disappeared from the public eye while reporting independently on the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan earlier this year. 

Facial-recognition technologies, integrated into security cameras, are also a potent tool. Documents unearthed by Human Rights Watch list ethnic minorities (mainly Muslims and Tibetans) and those who petition the government over grievances—both of which the state deems politically threatening—as specially monitored groups, for whom the police create face-image databases. 

A residential compound in Wuhan closed during lockdown. The government propaganda poster reads: “Visiting each other is killing each other. Gathering is committing suicide.” Photo by Painjet.

The health code service relies on and integrates itself with existing surveillance technologies, taking the thoroughness of state surveillance one step further. As noted by a widely shared Chinese article, the health code is the first surveillance technology that possesses three key features simultaneously: it is installed in a smartphone, uses facial recognition, and can be set up in a wide variety of public spaces. 

In this context, the health code service further reinforces China’s logic of social control: in the name of efficiency, safety, and stability, large amounts of personal data are harvested by the government and stored for an indefinite amount of time for purposes that are not always clear. Taken together, the measures in place create a kind of velvet prison—citizens are “protected” by the government in every aspect of daily life, yet there is also no room for deviating from the government line. 

The digital health code has become a symbol for China’s success in controlling COVID-19. From a scientific point of view, the utility of a functional contact-tracing system in battling an intractable disease is obvious. In the context of contemporary Chinese society and politics, however, the technology has been featured in a larger propaganda campaign about the alleged superiority of the Chinese system. 

The Communist Party government has arguably regained some domestic popularity after its initial mishandling of the outbreak, and the digital health code undoubtedly played a crucial role in its successful response. If the health code has shown Chinese people how technology protects a society from disasters, it has also been used to reinforce the idea that success in resolving a crisis comes from heavy state action, rather than transparency, humility, and respect for individual rights. 

Health workers from Hubei, the province in which Wuhan is located, bid farewell to the medical aid team from Shandong Province. Photo by Walter Grassroot.

China’s strategy for controlling COVID-19 does not have to be the only model for the world, however. The Australian government also launched an app to track its user’s COVID-19 contact history. Unlike China’s health code system, which requires extensive personal information, the Australian app only asks for basic information such as age range, phone number, postal code, name or pseudonym, and promises to wipe all data after 21 days. 

As more countries, including the U.S., look to adopt COVID-19 tracking apps, the Australian practice might provide a different answer to the question of striking the right balance between public health and data privacy. China’s comparative advantage in crisis management, though impressive, has far too many troubling consequences to be the example for the world. 

Peter Wang is a rising senior in Columbia College majoring in Philosophy. He is interested in the intersection between global affairs and investigative journalism. If he returns to New York, you can catch him attending film screenings downtown or looking for the best Japanese and Vietnamese restaurants in the city.

This article was submitted to CPR as a pitch. To write a response, or to submit a pitch of your own, we invite you to use the pitch form on our website.