Health Code

To have complete control over their subject is the dream of all rulers through out history. Tighter control over people could mean better military power, stronger economy, and more stable society. More than 2000 years ago, when ancient China is dominated by the Seven Warring States， emperors of Qin state established a system that grouped households by 5. Each group must report any crimes committed by members of the group and failure to report crimes would result in execution of everyone in the group. This system limits the movement of Qin’s population, which resulted in much more efficient taxation and military mobilization ability, which became a big factor in Qin’s eventual victory over all other states. With all the technological advancements over the next 2000 years, controlling the population become a much easier job today. Nowadays, people are constantly carrying smartphones that have cameras, microphones, and even a GPS locators to pinpoint their locations at all time. In modern China, the potential of smartphones is being realized by an application called Health Code which is currently giving the government a level of control beyond Qin emperor’s wildest dreams.

At the beginning, Health Code is the pride of China. During the first year of covid, it was obvious to any sensible person that to control the spread of the deadly virus, travel restrictions and contact tracing must be implemented. Health Code and similar apps was created by many governments for just that. In China, Health Code showed a QR code containing an evaluation of the probability that its user had contracted covid. Before going into any public spaces, everyone must show their Heath Code to prove they are not likely a carrier of covid. Heath Code did evaluation based on the user’s travel records and health records and classify their risk level as red (highest level, must go to quarantine center), yellow (mid level, not allowed in public spaces like malls or airports), green, (lowest level, safe for every thing). This groundbreaking system almost completely stopped the spread of covid in China. The daily increase in cases in China was once below ten while counties like America are seeing more than ten thousand new cases per day. For months, China’s success in controlling covid contrasted to the failure of the western countries was all the Chinese media could talk about. It really seemed that Health Code was a showcase of China’s modern and efficient government.

With great power came great responsibility. A powerful app like Health Code, which tracks health and location information of users and decide where everyone can go, must be managed with great care. Sadly, like many apps before them it is not. The first sign that something might go wrong was back in May of 2020. At the time covid seem to be closed to an end in China with almost 0 new cases every day in many provinces. Hangzhou, 8th largest city by GDP in China and home to e-commerce giant Alibaba, announced that Health Code would be upgraded and implemented permanently. The new Health Code was going to collect user’s entire health record and give an overall health score. This policy shocked a lot of people who thought Health Code is just a temporary measure. It immediately faced intense backlash on the internet where people raise privacy concerns over Health Code. The new health code was never realized maybe because of the backlash and maybe because the old version turned out to be in need for a much longer time.

As covid variants getting increasingly more contagious and countries around the world implementing increasingly less restrictions, keeping China covid-free became a much harder task. Harsher lockdown and restriction must be implemented to stop the spread. As a result, the government began to abuse the power given by Health Code. As a result, Health Code quickly turned in to a chaotic mess that is extremely disruptive to people’s lives. For example, in Beijing, in addition to QR code， a pop up window is added to the app. If the pop up window showed up in your Health Code your access to public spaces in Beijing maybe limit, and if it showed up when you are outside Beijing, then you may not even enter Beijing. Details of different types of pop up windows and how to deal with each of them is too complicated to talk about here and frankly too much for me to understand. From what I gathered, who got the window was decided kind of arbitrarily. You could be no where near a covid case and still get a pop up widow. Clearing it is also tedious and confusing from the instructions I read. A lot of covid tests and self quarantine is involved. Then after doing all that you often still have to deal with local officials to clear it manually for you. Apart from extensions like the pop up, the risk level evaluation also became abused. In Shanghai, if someone is in close contact with someone who is exposed to a covid patient, then his or her risk level will be set to red and send to quarantined with all the actual covid patients. In In Henan, things got even more out of hand. The local government manually set risk level to red for A group of protesters in order to stop their demonstrations.

Heath Code is a great example of the duality of technology.The app that save lives can also destroy lives. The lesson to learn from health code is that when giving a technology control over your lives, it is important to make sure some measure is in place to stop it from being abused.