This story is a snapshot of the tyranny of the health code in China since February 2020 as China’s technological innovation in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Upon landing at the Lhasa airport, all passengers turned on their phones and their health codes remained green! Everybody was happy. The plane was eventually instructed to return to Lhasa after half an hour at the Chengdu airport. The captain offered a solution to the frustrated passengers: “if you do not turn on your mobile phones while waiting at the Chengdu airport, your health codes will not change colour, as the big data won’t have record of you being in Chengdu.” Everybody agreed. The announcement caused uproar among passengers, who declared “No, not Chengdu we want to go back to Xining!” The reason was simple: stopping in Chengdu, a COVID red (high-risk) area, would turn everybody’s health code from green to yellow (if not red), which meant they would not be able to enter Tibet until their health codes turned green again (in 7–14 days). A plane flying from Xining (Qinghai) was forced to turn back from Lhasa (Tibet) due to severe weather and was instructed to land in Chengdu (Sichuan) and wait for the storms to pass. It is the process of interchange between the system and the lifeworld that deserves our critical attention.Ī story entitled “the journey of yellow code and green code” circulated among my various WeChat groups in early August 2021.
The health code is better taken as a medium of adaptable and communicative process that can reset the relation between the system and the lifeworld. It also illustrates how, from policy making and technological design to user engagement, the health code system is implemented, optimised, and used in everyday life to meet the needs of the vulnerable population. The article highlights the pretence of surveillance as care and the digital divide that normalises discrimination against the elderly and other digitally left-behind population. This article offers a critical analysis of China’s health code system, a data-powered pandemic control and contact tracing system that supposedly subjects all individuals in the country to its panopticon control, a surveillance system that monitors and categorises the Chinese population into the healthy (green), the dubious (yellow), and the unhealthy (red).
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