Chinese Public's Support Surveillance in Relation to the West
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Chinese Public’s Support for COVID-19
Dialogue
Surveillance in Relation to the West
Chuncheng Liu
University of California, San Diego, USA
c6liu@ucsd.edu
China’s Surveillance during COVID-19
During the first two months after the first COVID-19 case was identified in Wuhan, Chinese authorities
suppressed information, causing delayed disease control. When the outbreak became too severe to be kept
from the public in January 2020, Chinese authorities radically changed their stance and started to battle
COVID-19 with intensive efforts, facing the double challenge of a legitimacy crisis and the uncertain virus.
Expanded surveillance protocols were established while intensive surveillance practices were introduced
and mobilized. Many locations reported that people who had been wanted by the police for years were
turning themselves in, as expanded and routinized surveillance made it more difficult for them to hide.
Of these new surveillance measures, Health Code (jiankangma), the Chinese contact tracing app, generated
the most public and media attention. Health Code was launched in February 2020, drawing on a
collaboration between tech companies and municipal governments. Use of the app was made mandatory for
people visiting public spaces and, in some periods, leaving their residential communities. It required users
to upload their personal information (e.g., name, ID card number, and facial information in some places),
health information (e.g., body temperature and symptoms), and travel histories. Geolocation data was
collected by harvesting smartphone GPS data. Based on an algorithmic evaluation, Health Code returns
three kinds of color QR codes: green represents healthy and guarantees a free pass to public spaces. Yellow
and red represent different levels of risk, defined differently by different municipal governments at different
periods.1
The wide adoption of Health Code does not mean digital and automated surveillance was the only option.
Preexisting surveillance networks, personnel, and infrastructures were also quickly mobilized for disease
control and, in fact, functioned as the basis for digital surveillance (Liu 2020). For example, China’s unique
identification system, which was established in the 1980s and digitized in the 2000s, had been used to
identify individuals and enforce contact tracing while many other countries were still debating about the
trade-off and necessity of such systems (Martin 2021). Akbari’s (2021) discussion of Iran’s unsuccessful
surveillance shows the importance of such preexisting infrastructure and the state’s capacity from the
opposite side. Established surveillance camera networks in China were used to ensure people followed
quarantine regulations and to trace contacts. Community government staff worked hard to conduct physical
surveillance and offer services to residents. They oversaw quarantine enforcement and checked peoples’
1 For more specific discussions on Health Code, see Liu (2020).
Liu, Chuncheng. 2021. Chinese Public’s Support for COVID-19 Surveillance in Relation to the West.
Surveillance & Society 19(1): 89-93.
https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/index | ISSN: 1477-7487
© The author(s), 2021 | Licensed to the Surveillance Studies Network under a Creative Commons
Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives licenseLiu: Chinese Public’s Support for COVID-19 Surveillance Health Codes at community gates when the quarantine was over. In some areas, these staff also needed to conduct daily door-to-door checks on residents and epidemiological surveys. Surveillance in the pandemic was mostly a means to an end, not the end in itself. It was often part of other disease control strategies that finally paid off. China’s daily diagnosed cases dropped from seven thousand in early February 2020 to less than one hundred in March. On April 26, all cases were reportedly cured in Wuhan while no new cases were found for more than twenty days. Afterwards, China has had some local city-level outbreaks, but no nationwide epidemic has emerged. Three Stages of Surveillance Perception in Relation to the West To understand Chinese residents’ perceptions of surveillance during the pandemic, from April to June 2020, two research assistants and I conducted thirty-eight interviews with mainland China residents who had used Health Code. I also used keywords “surveillance (jiankong)” and “Health Code” to collect social media posts from Weibo, the Chinese Twitter.2 In general, Chinese citizens are well aware of the lack of privacy and invasive surveillance in society (Liu and Graham 2021). One avid supporter of Health Code told me during the interview that “In China no one has privacy, at least now they can use the information for something good.” People also admit that Western societies protect citizens’ privacy more. However, most people are compliant with the expanding surveillance, trust the government, and have been dissatisfied with Western countries during the pandemic, as revealed by a recent public opinion survey (Guang et al. 2020). I will explain these findings by examining how the Chinese public perceives China’s surveillance in relation to Western societies—both the West’s discourses on Chinese surveillance and their own (missing) surveillance practices. These perceptions can be roughly classified into three stages: the initial outbreak in China, the expansion of the outbreak beyond Chinese borders, and the period where Western countries began implementing their own surveillance measures. Discourse emerged from each stage and, although there was some overlap, these discourses did not replace each other. The first stage lasted approximately from the Wuhan lockdown (January 23, 2020) until March 2020, when the pandemic was still largely perceived as only a problem in China and other Asian countries. Expanded surveillance in China raised criticism in Western media focused on privacy and human rights, which quickly fed back to China. Many people perceived these criticisms as attacks on China. They were frustrated that the West did not acknowledge the concrete efforts and sacrifices that China made facing an uncertain and deadly pandemic, instead overly focusing on the rather abstract ethics of surveillance. This is why, in August, Peter Hessler’s (2020) article in The New Yorker quickly became a hit on Chinese social media. Hessler (2020) wrote about the Chinese local government’s door-to-door checking of residents’ health status—what other media may depict as “personal surveillance”—in a sympathetic way. For many people, this was the first time that China was not depicted as an Orwellian high-tech dystopia and was positively recognized in the Western media for its efforts at disease control. Facing criticism, arguments of “whataboutism” quickly emerged on the internet in two ways. The first claimed that Western countries surveil their citizens all the time too. The US—perceived as the harshest critic of China’s surveillance practices—was commonly mentioned for its surveillance program PRISM and National Security Agency in attempts to delegitimate the West as a whole. The second argued that Western media only targeted China while intentionally ignoring other countries with similar surveillance practices. For example, a comment on social media argued that South Korea also used credit card records and other technology to surveil people, yet Americans kept silent and only attacked China.3 Interestingly, when the New York Post used similar language to comment on Taiwan’s surveillance—“disturbingly, almost 2Names of the interviewees and social media users are anonymized to protect their privacy. 3This is not true. For example, The New York Times published an article warning about COVID-19 surveillance in many countries, including South Korea, Singapore, and Mexico (Singer and Sang-Hun 2020). Surveillance & Society 19(1) 90
Liu: Chinese Public’s Support for COVID-19 Surveillance
everyone is traced” —causing Taiwan to object, many Chinese nationalists who refuted the Western media’s
criticism toward Chinese surveillance nevertheless fully supported the New York Post (Froelich 2020).
These Western criticisms of surveillance, perceived as biased and unfair, generated the reverse
psychological effect and pushed many Chinese residents to more fully embrace the state. This outlook was
further reinforced at the second stage when Western countries started to experience accelerating COVID-
19 outbreaks. At this stage, most host countries of media outlets that criticized Chinese disease surveillance
and control strategies did not enact intensive surveillance. In fact, many countries prepared poorly for
COVID-19, sometimes even denying its severity. As the number of infections and deaths in the West kept
climbing, China started to reopen its society. This sharp contrast significantly undermined the legitimacy of
Western societies’ sociopolitical system and ideological stance. Some people quickly jumped to the
conclusion that democracy and liberalism are fundamentally flawed, even beyond coping with COVID-19
(Fan et al. 2020). To be fair, this mirrors how many Western media outlets drew quick conclusions about
China’s sociopolitical system from cherrypicked cases.
The mishandling of COVID-19 in the US was prominently reported and discussed in China. Compared to
US authorities’ denial of the pandemic or basic disease control approaches (such as mask wearing),
surveillance in China became evidence of a caring government that respects science. For example, a retired
high school teacher kindly urged me to be careful in the US in April, saying: “These Western countries give
people too much freedom, but they also don’t care about their people, you see what people got there?…
Look at Trump, he never takes this seriously.” The contrast overshadowed concerns about surveillance and
even China’s delayed response in the early stages. Although Western media did not stop publishing critical
articles on China’s surveillance, they were taken less seriously and became sources of mockery within
China. Particularly, the human rights argument lost its ground, as an antagonistic conceptualization between
“human rights” and “rights of being alive” was constructed. For example, in a post from the US embassy
on China’s social media page (weibo) on World Human Rights Day, a comment, “Where are the human
rights of 300 thousand Americans (who died from COVID-19)?” received more than two thousand likes.
The last stage occured when many Western countries started to adopt surveillance practices, such as contact
tracing, and more media started to support such practices. To many people, this further proved that China
was right about surveillance from the beginning. For them, the changing stance of Western authorities and
media outlets also demonstrated their hypocrisy, which further pushed people to discredit information from
the West and acquire information from Chinese sources (Ma and Zhan 2020). Comments like “at least
Chinese media admit that they are the mouthpiece of the state and party” became popular on social media.
In the comment section of a video of the South Australia Premier praising the state’s contact tracing QR
code as a “fantastic new tool” in December, one person devised a satire:
China QR code – “invasion of privacy, invasion of human rights.”
Australian QR Code – “Fantastic new tool.”
Differences between different surveillance systems, such as the voluntary enrollment in contact tracing and
explicit data protection protocols, were largely ignored. Some people were even concerned that, in the name
of privacy protection, the voluntary surveillance approach in Western societies would make the whole
system meaningless. This concern was often entangled with mockery of, and sometimes genuine confusion
towards, the West for weighing “human rights” more heavily than “rights of being alive,” delegitimizing
the West and strengthening approval for domestic surveillance.
Complicated Origins of the Simplified Thinking
This dialogue essay selects typical examples to show how Chinese residents perceived domestic surveillance
in relation to Western societies. I do not intend to argue that Chinese people are all uncritical of domestic
surveillance. For example, when the Hangzhou government proposed to keep using Health Code after
Surveillance & Society 19(1) 91Liu: Chinese Public’s Support for COVID-19 Surveillance
COVID-19, a huge backlash was mobilized with privacy protection as the central concern. Days later, the
government had to clarify that it was only a thought and never an actual plan. However, as a study on
international Chinese students shows, when criticism of the Chinese government comes from the West, it is
often interpreted as a criticism of a vague concept of “China” that includes the Chinese people (Hail 2015).
It then evokes defensive mechanisms even for Chinese people who are critical of the government when
communicating with other Chinese. Similar defensiveness has been observed in the pandemic, which further
distanced people from Western information and generated greater support for the Chinese authority (Ma
and Zhan 2020; Fan et al. 2020).
Of course, Chinese propaganda and censorship contribute to this public antagonism towards the West
through sophisticated misinformation campaigns.4 However, it is problematic to assume that the public
opinions are downstream effects of state propaganda and ignore the spontaneity and complicated social
context that produces them. For example, although international students are away from the Chinese
propaganda system’s direct influence and many felt angry in January at the government cover-up, studies
have found that many of these students became more accepting of China’s disease control, nationalism, and
even authoritarianism when the pandemic became rampant in their host countries (Ma and Zhan 2020; Fan
et al. 2020). Public discourse before the 2010s has an “overly rosy” imagining of Western society,
precipitating side effects when people realize Western societies are simply not perfect (Huang and Yeh
2019). All of these contribute to peoples’ support for Chinese authority and domestic disease surveillance,
support that is not limited to only nationalists. Even for Chinese liberals who are critical of the authoritarian
regime and still keep a distance from nationalism, facing the unstopped rise of the case and death numbers
in the West led some to admit to the advantages of the Chinese surveillance solution and dampened their
criticism of domestic practices, if not fully silencing them.5
As surveillance scholars have noted, many of the controversies and debates surrounding surveillance
practices are the result of straw-manning and false dichotomy (Akbari 2021; Krueger, Best, and Johnson
2020). The binary pairs of “West/China,” “democracy/authoritarian,” and “human rights/rights of being
alive” around surveillance during COVID-19 are all salient examples. They are simplified and problematic,
yet powerful and prevailing as frames for public discourse. Within these frames, being critical of one side
is commonly misunderstood as being compliant to another—a problem that could be observed among
Chinese and Western publics, the media, and policymakers. People who try to find a middle ground are
unfortunately often caught in the crossfire. However, as Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower of the pandemic
who died of COVID-19 put it, “There should be more than one voice in a healthy society” (qtd. in Tan et
al. 2020).
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