Algorithmic policing: The datafication and categorization of everyday life in China’s pandemic technogovernance

This article examines the role of human discretion in China’s COVID-19 pandemic management. Following a tradition of ethnographic inquiry into street-level bureaucracy, I develop a culturally focused approach to the algorithmic dimension of this medical policing institution. Based on 14 months of field research inside the contact tracing system, combined with historical sociology of modern Chinese policing, I propose a model of the “labeling culture” which situates the historically distinctive aspects of the way Chinese police constructs risky subjects within more general theorization of contemporary governmentality. I argue that the mode of labeling culture helped the institutional structure of the Chinese bureaucracy adapt to changing circumstances and absorb novel technologies into its established systems of policing and surveillance, while ensuring that human discretion would continue to play a guiding role. This contributes to our understanding of the interface between media technology, digital surveillance, and techno-political culture.