The EconomistFebruary 29th 2020 China 252 dance of up-to-the-minute intelligence on
almost every citizen. In the far-western
province of Xinjiang, there may be some
truth in this. Data culled from smart-
phones and ubiquitous facial-recognition
cameras are used to identify people there
whom the authorities regard as threaten-
ing: devout Muslims or those with a fond-
ness for Xinjiang’s non-Han cultures. Such
information has helped the government
round up more than 1m people and put
them in “re-education centres”.
But those efforts involve only a single
province. Creating such systems is far
harder when it entails data-sharing be-
tween provinces, or between provincial
and central authorities. Co-operation is
undermined by competition for favour in
Beijing. The boss of a foreign artificial-in-
telligence developer in China says that fus-
ing datasets within a single firm is often
quick, but not if it involves co-operation
between different institutions. “The per-
son in charge is unwilling to take the risk,”
he says, and usually reckons that doing
nothing is safer than sharing.
Even with the best of technology and
the most joined-up of bureaucracies, track-
ing covid-19 would be difficult. Other dis-
eases that have caused global alarm this
century, such as Ebola and sars, have been
easier to monitor because those infected
have quickly shown symptoms, unlike
those with the covid-19 virus.
A “close-contact” app being developed
with much fanfare by a state-owned firm,
China Electronics Technology Group Cor-
poration, therefore should be viewed with
scepticism. (The company is also responsi-
ble for much of the surveillance technol-
ogy deployed in Xinjiang.) The app is sup-
posed to provide officials with data drawn
from the National Health Commission, the
Ministry of Transport, China Railway and
the Civil Aviation Administration of China
to track citizens’ travel, health and contacts
with infected people. But it is not clear how
work on this is proceeding, if it is at all.
For now, China’s digital monitoring
methods for covid-19 are a hodgepodge of
disjointed efforts by city and provincial
governments, as well as the technology
giants Alibaba and Tencent. Witness the
self-assessment system that ensnared Ms
Sun. It is being rolled out by Ant Financial,
an Alibaba affiliate that runs Alipay, a ubiq-
uitous payment app. Two hundred cities
are now using it, says Alibaba, after its trial
in Hangzhou. Ant Financial eventually
plans to offer it nationwide.
A representative of Ant Financial says
the app, which is bundled with Alipay, is
merely a conduit for data compiled by the
government. Tencent’s WeChat, a social-
media platform, offers a similar app using
data from the same source. It has been in-
troduced in Tencent’s home town, Shen-
zhen. Such non-state firms may be best-
equippedtoharnessdatatogoodeffectin
thebattleagainstthevirus.Unlikegovern-
mentbodies,theyhavea cohesivenation-
wideviewoftheircustomersandreadyac-
cesstointimatedetailsaboutthem.
BothAlipayandWeChatharvesttheir
users’locationdata.ThroughWeChat,Ten-
centknowswhoitsuserstalkto.WeChat
PayandAlipayknowwhoreceivestheirus-
ers’money.BothTencentandAntFinancial
knowwhattravelticketstheirusershave
boughtthroughthecompanies’respective
apps.Theyhavebetterreal-timeawareness
ofwhatChinesepeoplearedoinganddis-
cussingthanthegovernmentitself.
PeopleinChina,aswellasindemocra-
cies,worryabouthowtechcompaniesuse
thedatatheygarnerfromtheircustomers.
Butifcovid-19becomesa pandemic,they
maywellbecomemoreinclinedtoforgive
a morenosyuseofpersonaldataif doingso
helpsdefeatthevirus. 7“D
on’t deleteyour browser history,”
Lin Kai warns his 11-year-old son,
who is supposed to be live-streaming lec-
tures delivered by his schoolteachers. Mr
Lin has reason to be anxious. To curb the
spread of covid-19, the authorities have
closed schools and universities indefinite-
ly. But “study must not stop”, says the edu-
cation ministry. Under its orders, the coun-
try’s biggest exercise in remote learning is
under way, watched over by parents. Mr
Lin, who lives in the eastern city of Hang-
zhou, has caught his son being distracted
by online games. He wants his son to knowthat he will inspect the browser for evi-
dence of such naughtiness.
There are other ways to enforce disci-
pline. Liu Weihua, who teaches at Wuhan
University of Technology, cold-calls his
students during live streams. With sit-
down exams now impossible, his grading
system places more emphasis on how stu-
dents perform in classroom discussions,
Mr Liu explains. These are conducted using
video-conferencing platforms such as
Dingtalk by Alibaba, a tech giant, and Ke-
tang by Tencent, a competitor.
Slow internet speeds at home are no ex-
cuse for shirking, says Yue Qiu, a second-
ary-school teacher in Beijing. If connec-
tions are too wobbly for video calls,
students can download audio files and as-
signments. Parental supervision is encour-
aged. The municipal government of Beijing
has decreed that, in households with two
working parents, one is entitled to stay
home without any loss of pay.
In poor rural areas, where some house-
holds lack internet access, instruction by
television fills the void. Since February 17th
China Education Network, a state-run ser-
vice, has been broadcasting classes every
weekday from 8am to 10pm. The first les-
son of the day is aimed at pupils in the first
year of primary school. Programmes for
older children air in the afternoon and eve-
ning. All core subjects, such as mathemat-
ics and Chinese, are covered.
The disruption is felt most keenly by
pupils in the final year of secondary school.
That is the year leading up to the gaokao,
the notoriously hard university-entrance
exam. Many parents fret that online learn-
ing is a poor substitute for classroom in-
struction. Hou Kaixuan, who will sit the
gaokaoin the northern city of Zhangjiakou
this summer, eagerly awaits the re-open-
ing of his school. “I’m simply more produc-
tive in a physical classroom,” he says.
Not all his classmates agree. Kaixuan
observes that some of them study just as
hard at home as in school, and take per-
verse pleasure in the fact that others must
be slacking off. (It helps that very little new
material is taught in the last year of second-
ary school. The emphasis is on revision.)
When schools and universities eventu-
ally re-open, classrooms may be different,
says Mr Yue, the teacher in Beijing. The
teacher-student relationship will become
“less hierarchical”, he predicts. That is be-
cause China’s prolonged experiment with
online learning is reducing the typical re-
serve between instructor and pupil. Teach-
ers who were previously reluctant to give
out their contact details on WeChat, a mes-
saging app, now rely on it to respond to stu-
dents’ queries. At Mr Yue’s school, students
may even call their teachers to ask for feed-
back. If he is right, such a breaking-down of
barriers could be one of the few happy by-
products of the epidemic. 7BEIJING
Education has been badly disrupted by
covid-19. There are upsidesRemote learningGetting to know
your teacher
Time for the roll call