Abstract
Linked to each citizen’s national identification number, official health code programmes rely on a range of datasets, from flight-booking records and Covid-19 test results to seating arrangements on domestic trains. Residents may also self-report their health conditions, such as fever or cold symptoms, through questionnaires to provide cross-reference.
Such data is readily accessible to Chinese authorities, as public services in the country, including public transport systems and medical facilities, are required to collect ID numbers from citizens – a rule that has been strictly enforced amid the epidemic.
I returned to Beijing from the USA in March. Upon my stressful arrival, I was asked to self-quarantine for 14 days, with my mail and takeaways delivered by the guards of my apartment complex. I was assigned a health code by the city’s government. Green means healthy and free to travel; yellow means quarantine at home; and red means quarantine at a designated facility.
A shopping area security guard in Beijing checks the health code on a woman’s mobile phone app before she is allowed to enter
CREDIT: Kevin Frayer/Getty
Two weeks after my arrival, my Beijing health code turned green. Like other Beijingers, I started going out once in a while, albeit cautiously. At buildings, restaurants and shops, the staff would ask for my health code before taking my temperature, and sometimes noting down my phone number. “No abnormalities”, mine read, next to a green check-mark.
The health code system worked smoothly, until it didn’t. Before my grocery run on my third weekend in China, my health code mysteriously turned red – meaning “centralised quarantine”.
What could have gone wrong? I had followed all the regulations and hadn’t visited any high-risk area since my freedom; nor had I received a call from the authorities. I had to cancel my plans for the week. If I showed up at the mall with a red health code, the guard would not only turn me away but might also report me to the authorities for a supposed violation of quarantine policies.
It must have been a bug, I figured. But to make things worse, I didn’t know who I should talk to. The interface itself didn’t allow me to file a dispute, and after making hours of phone calls to several government agencies – all of which told me they had no authority over my profile and put the blame on another department – I gave up.
I wasn’t the only one. On Chinese social media, anxious citizens from all over the country reported glitches on their health code programmes, preventing them from entering their offices. Fortunately, as mysteriously as it went away, my green code came back a few days later.
Technical inaccuracies are only one aspect of the bureaucratic mess. Each province – and sometimes each city – has its own health code programme. Your code may be green on one system but red on another. While the national government is in the process of integrating all local programmes on to one centralised platform and has issued a national standard, citizens have found domestic trips a hassle as China revitalises its travel industry.
Privacy protection has also become a major concern. Health code systems don’t continuously track a person’s location using GPS or Bluetooth – as contact-tracing apps in other countries have proposed – yet the programmes in some cities do map out one’s whereabouts through manual scanning. Sigmend Weng, a student in Xi’an, Shaanxi province, tells Index that guards have been scanning his health code, which is associated with his national ID number, to record his entries to public places.
Weng says he doesn’t mind giving away his location data for security in the face of an epidemic, but would be less comfortable with it as his city gradually returns to normality.
The majority of health code programmes, researchers at Shanghai’s Mana Data Foundation have found, do not offer clear user agreements or privacy policies – a worrying fact for applications that collect a wide range of highly sensitive information.
Citizen databases have traditionally been vulnerable targets for hackers, says Suji Yan, a Shanghai-based entrepreneur and software engineer. Yan fears the integration of personal information across platforms, as well as the information sharing amongst multi-level government agencies, will increase the likelihood of largescale leaks of personal data.
As China continues to build its digital surveillance system through artificial intelligence and big data, such pandemic measures could potentially make it easier – not just for the government but also for profit-hungry tech corporations involved in the data-mining – to track the footprints of citizens over the long term, further restraining their (already limited) civil liberties.
As the country recovers from Covid-19, one might see China’s health codes as proof that digital surveillance does work. In truth, however, extensive networks of personal data are only peripheral to China’s reopening strategy.
Even before health codes were introduced, businesses and places of work had already enforced security measures, with guards actively taking the temperatures of visitors and asking where they had been. Without health codes, individuals were often asked to provide proof of roaming history, issued by telecom operators, showing that they had not recently visited high-risk regions such as Hubei province.
“The health code is a way to make that existing security protocol more efficient,” said Dan Grover, a California-based product manager and tech blogger who has researched digital measures in China’s battle against the pandemic. “They already have this crazy patchwork system, in which everybody is using heuristics to decide who gets to go to the store, but now you can make that more systematic and more scientific than it was before.”
The government of Hangzhou, which was first to roll out the programme, has stopped mandating residents to display their health codes at public venues since the end of March. Officials in Yunnan province have claimed that health code data will be destroyed once the epidemic ends, although no possible timeline has been provided. Meanwhile, as Beijing loosens its mandatory quarantine policy, I’m asked to show my health code less frequently than I was.
While some cities are dropping health codes, others are bracing for a second wave. David Cohen and Eliza Gkritsi of TechNode, a China-based news outlet, reported more dynamic adoption, with “ramp-ups in digital controls and checkpoints, presumably in response to recent increases in case numbers” in Guangzhou and Yantai – a contrast to the lax implementation in Shanghai.
In March, the city of Guangzhou announced its plan to turn health codes into long-term digital identity certificates, but it has not further elaborated what that might look like.
It is still too early to predict the future of health codes. But if China does want to double-down on its digital surveillance, maybe it doesn’t have to take advantage of this crisis at all. “For practical purposes, all these government databases are already keyed on the national ID card,” Grover said. “Why do you need a separate digital code and make people conscious of the surveillance?”