The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-26)

A12 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, MAY 26 , 2022

The World

PAKISTAN

Khan’s backers scuffle

with police before rally

Police in Pakistan fired tear gas
and scuffled with stone-throwing
supporters of ousted prime
minister Imran Khan ahead of
planned marches Wednesday
toward central Islamabad. Khan
had called his followers to rally
outside Parliament to bring down
the government and force early
elections.
The marches have raised fears
of major violence between backers
of the former premier and security
forces. The government of Khan’s

successor, Shehbaz Sharif, has

banned the rally and warned Khan

of arrest if he went ahead with it.

The Supreme Court ruled later

Wednesday that the rally could

take place — but only at a

specifically allocated public

grounds. However, Khan urged his

backers to head toward the square

near Parliament for the rally.

Earlier in the morning, riot

police fired tear gas and pushed

back hundreds of demonstrators

who hurled stones as they tried to

pass a bridge that was blocked

near the city of Lahore to board

buses bound for Islamabad, the

capital. Dozens of Khan’s followers

also briefly clashed with police in

Islamabad.

Altercations were also reported

elsewhere, including in the city of

Karachi, where demonstrators

burned a police vehicle.

At least a dozen protesters and

many police officers were injured.

Khan, a former cricket star

turned Islamist politician, was

ousted in a no-confidence vote in

Parliament last month.

— Associated Press

AFGHANISTAN

Blasts kill at least 14 in

Kabul, Mazar-e Sharif

E xplosions shook Afghanistan

on Wednesday, the Taliban said,

including a blast inside a mosque

in the capital that killed at least

five worshipers and three

bombings of minivans in the

north that killed nine passengers.

The Islamic State group’s local

affiliate claimed responsibility for

the minivan bombings.

The Kabul Emergency Hospital

said it received 22 victims of the

mosque blast, including five dead.

A Taliban-appointed spokesman

in Balkh province said explosive

devices were placed in the vans

targeted in Mazar-e Sharif. He said

15 people were wounded in

addition to the nine killed.

The Islamic State’s claim was

posted by the group’s Aamaq

news agency.

— Associated Press

Dozens of migrants missing off

Tunisia: Rescue teams searched

for dozens of people reported

missing after a boat carrying

migrants from Libya to Europe

capsized off Tunisia’s coast. The

International Organization for

Migration said 30 people were

rescued and 75 were unaccounted

for after the boat sank off the city

of Sfax in southern Tunisia. One

body has been recovered,

authorities said. According to the

Sfax national guard, the vessel

ran aground six miles from the

Kerkennah Islands.

Uganda criminally charges

leader of protests: Ugandan

opposition leader Kizza Besigye

was criminally charged by

authorities, accused of inciting

violence with his efforts to stage

protests over rising commodity

prices that the government largely

blames on the war in Ukraine.

Besigye, a four-time presidential

candidate, is a serial campaigner

against the government of

longtime President Yoweri

Museveni and has been arrested

dozens of times. He has rarely

faced charges in court, however.

— From news services

DIGEST

BY EVA DOU

AND PEI-LIN WU

beijing — It sounds like a sci-fi
movie: personal codes that grant
you access to society or turn you
into a pariah.
In China, this high-tech reality
is here. These health mobile codes
are updated in real time with
your latest coronavirus test infor-
mation and movements around
town. Lose your green-code sta-
tus, and you could be locked out
of public spaces for days or weeks.
Officials tout the system as an
innovative way to do what virtu-
ally no other nation is still at-
tempting: eradicate all outbreaks
of the fast-moving omicron vari-
ant of the coronavirus. It’s a stag-
geringly expensive campaign to
test tens of millions of people dai-
ly, and there’s no end in sight.
Remember Tamagotchis?
Those digital pocket pets of the
1990s? These codes also require
continual care and nourishment,
except you need a negative coro-
navirus test every one to three
days to feed this beast.
Also, if your Tamagotchi dies of
neglect, you can restart the game.
If you mess up your coronavirus
code, you can’t enter a shop or
public building and might be
shipped off to quarantine.
These QR codes were intro-
duced in the early pandemic days
for contact tracing, but with
many cities instituting continu-
ous testing, they’re becoming a
more intrusive part of life. With
the devastation of Shanghai’s to-
tal lockdown in mind, officials
hope that constant tests will help
them catch outbreaks early.
In China’s capital, Beijing, a
new term has been coined, tanch-
uang, or “pop-up window,” in ref-
erence to the app’s pop-up warn-

ing when you lose your precious

green-code status. Those who are

“pop-up windowed” — the noun

does double duty as a verb — are

locked out of offices, supermar-

kets, taxis, buses and any other

public spaces until they can clear

their status.

“If you skip one day, then you

have a pop-up window problem,”

says Erin Chen, 32, who works in

Beijing’s Chaoyang district,

where daily coronavirus testing

became a requirement this

month amid an outbreak.

There are different levels of

tanchuang. If you missed only a

coronavirus test, you can remedy

your situation in as little as a day

by taking a free test at one of the

sidewalk stands located every few

blocks across Beijing.

But if you unwittingly wander

through a part of town designat-

ed as a covid hot zone, then you

must stay home until a worker

comes to test you and you are

cleared — which could take days.

“Stay in place, and wait for a

notice for coronavirus testing,”

the text message says. “Thank you

for your understanding about this

inconvenience to you.”

The unluckiest souls are

deemed close contacts of a covid

patient, and they are assigned to

quarantine centers. On Saturday,

about 5,000 residents of one Bei-

jing housing complex were taken

for seven days of quarantine, after

26 cases were found in their com-

munity, according to state media.

Authorities have published in-

tricate flow charts to try to eluci-

date the various routes to tanch-

uang. But hot zones are declared

retroactively, making it impossi-

ble to guarantee a safe outing, no

matter how hard one studies the

charts. The lack of clarity is a fea-

ture not a bug: It’s an incentive

for everyone to, well, just stay

home.

It results in an uncommon de-

gree of reflection before ventur-

ing across town for a meeting or

to see friends — what if the trip

results in a downgrade to your

covid code?

The unyielding rules of tanch-

uang have resulted in some

strange experiences. One Shang-

hai executive, Ren Junxia, in Bei-

jing as a tourist, found herself

with a pop-up window on May 4.

Her hotel refused to let her back

in, saying that would put the en-

tire hotel under lockdown. She

ended up fleeing to a remote

stretch of the Great Wall.

“I became a wandering soul

with nowhere to go in the imperi-

al capital,” she wrote in an online

post that went viral.

Ren’s pop-up window disap-

peared on Day 5, as mysteriously

as it came, filling her with joy.

“My dear health code, you are

normal!!!”

Beijing residents have reported

being pop-up windowed while

walking across the street to buy

groceries and even while doing

nothing in their apartments.

Beijing, Shanghai and other

major cities appear to be follow-

ing the model of Shenzhen, Chi-

na’s southern high-tech hub,

which has managed to stave off

further outbreaks through con-

tinuous coronavirus testing of its

17.6 million people after a week-

long lockdown in March.

Although Shenzhen is down to

zero daily coronavirus cases, all

public spaces still require a nega-

tive test within 72 hours, with

some venues setting a shorter 48-

hour window. In the evenings,

long lines at testing centers snake

across the city.

Klaus Zenkel, the European

Union Chamber of Commerce’s

South China chair and a Shen-

zhen resident, said that while

wait times are short at some test

sites, they can exceed half an hour

at others.

“This testing is taking away a

lot of time of the people,” he said.

According to estimates by Chi-

na’s Soochow Securities, these

tests cost 50 cents to $1.19 per

test, which means the expendi-

tures could reach as high as

1.27 percent of China’s nominal

gross domestic product if 48-hour

testing becomes standardized

across major cities.

China’s financial capital,

Shanghai, did not require contin-

uous testing before it went into a

traumatic two-month lockdown

in March. As it begins to emerge,

Shanghai has announced plans

for “normalized” citywide corona-

virus testing, with an aim of hav-

ing a site within a 15-minute walk

from anywhere in the city.

The arrival of a digital code

guarding access to public life con-

jures up a previous project, Chi-

na’s social credit system. Begun in

2014, the social credit system

sparked considerable debate due

to fears that it would use “big

data” to rate individuals, poten-

tially affecting what they could do

and where they could go — remi-

niscent of a particularly famous

episode of the television serial

“Black Mirror.”

Jeremy Daum, a senior fellow

at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai Chi-

na Center in Beijing, said the so-

cial credit system was widely mis-

understood and has ended up in

practice to be largely a regulatory

mechanism for businesses. As for

the health codes, he said they dif-

fer from social credit in their nar-

row focus on coronavirus health

data.

“This is looking at a specific

data set of your test results and

where you’re located, it seems

like,” Daum said. “The difference

is that people imagine the social

credit system as analyzing all as-

pects of your life.”

Still, some residents worry the

health codes might endure as a

social gatekeeper.

On Monday, Tsinghua Univer-

sity law professor Lao Dongyan

wrote on social media platform

Weibo that she was concerned

about Beijing’s announcement

that public buses would require

health code check-ins.

“This also means the health

code may accompany us perma-

nently in our lives, controlling

our freedom of movement at any

time,” she wrote. “I am very con-

cerned about this, because such

measures have major hidden dan-

gers.”

Authorities have said the con-

tinuous testing program is tem-

porary, but they have not given a

timeline for when coronavirus

vaccination levels will be high

enough to lift controls. While

many of the test sites in Beijing,

Shanghai and Shenzhen are pop-

up tents, others are more perma-

nent structures that suggest resi-

dents may be in for a long haul.

One Shanghai resident, a 24-

year-old woman surnamed Liu

who declined to give her full

name to discuss local regulations,

said a sturdy testing booth was

just constructed outside her

housing complex, equipped with

air-conditioning.

“In the future, this 48-hour

PCR requirement basically means

you need to test every day,” she

said. “If you have a gap, your code

will turn gray and you can’t go

anywhere.”

Wu reported from Taipei, Taiwan. Lyric

Li in Seoul and Vic Chiang in Taipei

contributed to this report.

DISPATCH FROM CHINA

When QR red locks you out of normal life

BLOOMBERG NEWS

Residents line up at a coronavirus testing facility on Monday in Beijing, where a new term has been coined: tanchuang, or “pop-up window.” It refers to a person losing their green-code status.

EVA DOU/THE WASHINGTON POST

A QR red code in a health app in China. Not having a green code

could mean being locked out of public spaces for days or weeks.