POLITICS Businessweek29QILAI SHEN/BLOOMBERG (2); CAMERAS: GETTY IMAGES (2)
student was overwhelmed by calls and visits from
health officials, police officers, and other author-
ities; doctors came to take his temperature daily
for two weeks. He hadn’t contracted the virus.
Overwhelmed, the student turned off his phone.
Mobile phones—which, like social media
accounts, are linked to Chinese citizens’ national
identity numbers—are an integral part of China’s
surveillance. Now they’re a key part of its virus-
containment efforts. China’s Big Three state-owned
phone carriers have responded to the call last
month by the Ministry of Industry and Information
Technology to contribute data to fight the outbreak.
As of Feb. 12, China Mobile Ltd.’s 300-strong big-
data team had fulfilled more than 400 government
requests for information on people’s movement.
China Telecom Corp. has helped 24 provinces
install a system that lets officials and medical staff
record and monitor people’s personal, health, and
travel information. It’s also adding systems at office
buildings that track people’s identities and health
through facial recognition and infrared tempera-
ture scanners.
Technology from Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s
WeChat and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Alipay
is also helping the government monitor people’s
movements. The companies developed a color-
coded health- rating system to identify people as
high-, medium-, or low-risk. The system scans peo-
ple seeking to enter offices, malls, and subways and
allows or denies them access based on their rat-
ings. Hubei and other provinces are requiring any-
one selling cough or fever treatments to report the
buyers’ identities.
The new tools are intensifying the paranoia
that’s setting in as some of China’s 1.4 billion peo-
ple isolate themselves at home, with little to do
but search the internet. Baidu Inc.’s map function
now shows how crowded a neighborhood is so
people can avoid congested areas, while WeChat
has added functionality so users of its social net-
work can see if they’re in the proximity of con-
firmed virus cases. WeChat and microblogging site
Weibo have set up online services where people
can report friends, family members, and neigh-
bors who might be sick or who aren’t taking proper
quarantine precautions.
Since late January, spreadsheets and lists iden-
tifying people living in or returning home from
Wuhan have been circulating around social media,
including on Weibo. A Wuhan resident included in
one of the lists says he recently received an influx
of strange calls. The resident, who asked to remain
anonymous to prevent further harassment, says
he quarantined himself alone at home for 14 daysbecause his parents both tested po
for the virus. His mother recovered
spending four days in the hospital, whi
father remains at a local hospital.
Across the country, scores of neig
committee members have been de
take people’s temperatures each day
their whereabouts. Earlier in February, a group of
young women in red down jackets and flimsy surgi-
cal masks went door to door in Beijing’s Shichahai
neighborhood with clipboards to record residents’
temperatures, ID numbers, and recent travel. One,
a party member who says she oversees 500 house-
holds, told a Bloomberg reporter that as a disease-
prevention measure, the community would now
restrict outsiders from entering—including grocery
deliverymen—on orders “from above.”
The panic and fear that blanket surveillance
creates could actually undermine efforts to
contain the epidemic. China had come under
criticism for silencing doctors in Wuhan who sus-
pected early on the virus was serious, and the
suspicion facing people thought to be potentially
ill could discourage the transparency needed to
engender trust and fight an epidemic, says Stuart
Hargreaves, a law professor at Chinese University
of Hong Kong who researches surveillance and
privacy issues. “If you had an approach that
encouraged the reporting of ‘negative’ informa-
tion, rather than punishing it, then this outbreak
might have been limited at a much earlier point,”
he says.
It’s also not clear that the use of mass surveil-
lance will be effective. While it might seem useful to
have full oversight of citizens’ movements and vital
signs, making use of data on that scale requires
manpower and training that China’s police force
lacks, says Suzanne Scoggins, an assistant professor
at Clark University. Scoggins, who researches polic-
ing and authoritarian control in China, says trac-
ing the spread of a virus is different from tracking
the movements of dissidents or criminals.
still relatively new technology that is likely
used in a way that is different from its origin
design,” she says. “It may help some, but w
shouldn’t expect it to contain an outbreak
Blanket surveillance is different fr
so-called contact tracing, a practic
goes back centuries to map a disease
most famously when Dr. John Snow
find the source of the 1854 cholera o
London—a water pump. The usefuln
tech surveillance tools will be limited u
identify the incubation period of the new coro-
navirus and develop rapid diagnostic tests and A Baidu app shows
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