Chinese officials on Wednesday addressed mounting public outrage over the abuse of the mandatory coronavirus “health code” system to suppress protests against a banking scandal – by improbably claiming the whole affair was just a minor technical glitch.
China’s state-run Global Times related a few stories of people who found their color-coded health status suddenly turning red and then weakly insinuated it was merely a coincidence that most of those people happened to be depositors at four banks in the central Henan province that are embroiled in a billion-dollar financial scandal.
It was also supposedly a coincidence that all these people abruptly found themselves with red health codes – which got some of them detained and quarantined, although the Global Times forgot to mention that – on Monday, the same day massive protests were to take place outside the scandal-plagued Henan banks and government regulatory offices.
“As of Tuesday afternoon, some of the red codes have returned green automatically, and Henan authorities said errors in the database may be the reason for the glitch,” the Global Times wrote on Wednesday.
According to the Communist Party newspaper, the “relevant complaints” have all been referred to the “relevant authorities,” and every official is doing their part to handle the “glitch,” which is magically resolving itself anyway:
As of press time, some depositors in Zhengzhou found their health codes returned green before taking nucleic acid tests. Among people who returned to their hometowns from Zhengzhou, some people’s codes turned back to green while some remained red.
It is unclear whether the “codes turning red” only occur among depositors, but it is believed to be errors in the database, media cited Henan local staff as saying.
The Global Times was informed by Zhengzhou city hotline 12345 that the red code was not granted at the city level and the city cannot handle the situation. The hotline has received multiple inquiries as of Tuesday afternoon and reported the situation to senior authority.
“Given the banking case’s background, the latest ‘red health code’ was seen by some in the public as a way to obstruct depositors from gathering in Zhengzhou to withdraw their money,” the Global Times conceded, after doing its best to convince those people they were mistaken.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) noted on Wednesday that protests over the banking scandal remain ongoing, despite whatever shenanigans may have occurred with the coronavirus health codes. Depositors across China are increasingly worried that similar abuses might be taking place at far more banks than the four in Henan that are refusing to let people withdraw their own money.
“At the heart of the issue is the opacity of small banks’ shareholding structure, which has allowed some shareholders to amass substantial stakes in the banks without regulatory approval, while also using lenders to secure loans,” the SCMP reported.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.