Chinese government can monitor citizens despite dropping COVID-19 app

Radio Free Asia

The Chinese government still has vast amounts of data on its citizens’ movements, despite pausing an unpopular COVID-19 tracker app in the wake of nationwide protests, analysts told Radio Free Asia.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) in mid-December 2022 stopped using its “Health Code” smartphone app tracking citizens’ COVID-19 status as well as their movements in and out of high-risk areas.  It was part of an overall loosening of the PRC’s zero-COVID policy.

But the app, which tracked movements of Chinese citizens, together with the immune status of COVID-19 cases and contacts, had already gathered data on the country’s entire population, including residents of Hong Kong and Macau. (Pictured: Chinese citizens head to work in Shenzhen in mid-March 2022. Despite eliminating an app that tracks COVID-19 cases, authorities still can monitor the population’s movements.)

Yang Haiying, a professor at Japan’s Shizuoka University, said the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) decided to pause the app to maintain political stability following a wave of anti-lockdown protests, some of which included calls for CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping to step down, across China in late November.

“The government will continue to manage and monitor the whole of society using big data,” Yang said. “[These protests] didn’t form the basis for a democratic movement.”

Signs had already emerged of widespread “mission creep” from the app, with complaints from users that their “health codes” had changed from green to amber after they bought over-the-counter cold remedies or pain relief medication, forcing them to take a COVID-19 test before being able to leave home under the old restrictions.

The PRC in early November 2022 announced it planned to digitize the medical records of its 1.4 billion people, harnessing the power of big data to track the health status of everyone in the country.

The National Health Commission and other health-related agencies issued a directive calling for the installation of “dynamically managed electronic health records and universal electronic health codes for every resident” by 2025.

This will mean that the healthcare records of every individual in mainland China will be digitized, linked to their national ID card number via a national platform, and integrated with a unified health code that can be widely shared among hospitals, clinics and, potentially, government agencies.

Chinese political scholar Chen Daoyin said the new COVID-19 rules don’t mean the government will give up its strict monitoring of the public.

“The travel tracker works mainly off your mobile phone signal, because mobile phones in mainland China are all either China Unicom, China Mobile and China Telecom, so that data is already available,” Chen said.

“During the past three years, it was used to track people’s movements [in the app].”

“Now that the COVID-19 itinerary tracker has been stopped, they can still use that data if they need to track the movements of specific groups of people, as we saw during the [anti-lockdown protests],” Chen said.

Current affairs commentator Fang Yuan said the government can easily keep monitoring people using the big data it already has.

“There has been an enormous accumulation of big data over the past few years, with very detailed personal information available,” Fang said. “Those in power aren’t going to give up such a tasty morsel any time soon.”

IMAGE CREDIT: GETTY