Chinese social media users began posting alleged evidence in the past week that the dreaded “health code” application – which the Communist Party used to place citizens in a state of abrupt house arrest whenever they were suspected of a Wuhan coronavirus infection – may have been reactivated in light of the ongoing pneumonia outbreak in the country.
Some local governments reportedly responded to the concerns by claiming the government never deactivated the application, so it was never brought back online.
The health code app, known in Chinese as jiankangma (健康码), gives its user a rating of green, yellow, or red, depending on exposure to confirmed coronavirus cases, updated vaccinations, and other information. Anything less than a green code bans users from public transportation, throats, and other public spaces. Restoring a green rating requires multiple negative coronavirus tests and, sometimes, the ingestion of Chinese-approved vaccination products. China insists the use of the application is “voluntary,” although not using the app effectively bans a person from public life.
The Chinese government notably used the health code to silence protests by abruptly turning the code “red” – banning people from public life – during a widespread protest against Chinese real estate companies and banks in 2022.
The Communist Party stopped using the health code app to keep citizens out of public life in December 2022 but did not actively encourage citizens to delete the app from their phones. In 2020, local Chinese Communist Party officials discussed using the app to give citizens a “health rating” beyond coronavirus, tracking individual alcoholic drinks, tobacco, exercise, and other personal information.
Parents with children who are suffering from respiratory diseases are lining up at a children’s hospital in Chongqing, China, on November 23, 2023. (Photo by Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty)
China, particularly the northeast and Beijing region, is experiencing a dramatic surge in respiratory infection cases. Dramatic images of desperate parents flooding hospitals with sick children, children forced to do homework in hospitals while attached to an IV drip, and frantic doctors running out of room for patients have surfaced on social media in the past month.
The Chinese government has not denied the images and has confirmed a surge in such diseases, but claims that the Party has the situation under control and that the illnesses are caused by a variety of known pathogens, not any new disease.
The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) has supported Beijing’s claims, insisting no evidence exists of the emergence of a new pathogen.
Chinese public health experts have blamed genocidal dictator Xi Jinping’s brutal “zero-covid” policy for the out-of-control pneumonia outbreak. The Communist Party’s “zero-covid” policy required the home imprisonment of millions of people simultaneously through city-wide lockdowns, often leaving people no way of accessing necessary medicine or food. “Zero-covid” also trapped thousands of people in poorly-run quarantine camps and imposed the tyranny of the “health code” mobile phone app, which did not allow people to live their normal lives unless the “code” on the phone appeared green.
The lockdowns, the Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times admitted in late November, resulted in Chinese citizens not being properly exposed to common pathogens, particularly children who were born during the lockdowns and thus never got the appropriate exposure.
Subsequently, the lifting of “zero-covid” provisions has led to large numbers of cases of far more severe disease than typically documented from infections of influenza, adenovirus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), or bacterial mycoplasma pneumonia. Similar, but far less severe, increases in hospitalizations due to these diseases have been documented in some parts of the United States.
Sick children, accompanied by their parents, receive infusion treatment at the Department of Pediatrics of the People’s Hospital in Fuyang city, Anhui province, China, November 28, 2023. (CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
Chinese citizens in Sichuan and Guangdong provinces reportedly began using social media to post screenshots of their “health code” app, dormant following the November 2022 anti-“zero-covid” protests, showing an active green square. A news article by the Chinese-language site “Top News” compiled the reports and suggested that the cities had reactivated the program. According to Radio Free Asia (RFA), however, the article disappeared shortly after its posting.
“While the article remained visible in syndicated form on Sohu.com’s mobile website on Monday, it had disappeared from the Top News website,” RFA observed.
Similar articles continued to spread on Chinese-language websites outside of the reach of Communist Party censors, however, including the anti-communist Epoch Times and major Singaporean newspaper Nanyang Sin-Chew Lianhe Zaobao. RFA also spoke to an anonymous nurse who confirmed, “health codes have already started coming back online in various places.”
Given that the application uses coronavirus tests to give users a green mark, it is unclear how the application would work to limit the freedoms of its users in the face of an outbreak China claims is being caused by a variety of diseases, none of them Wuhan coronavirus.
RFA compiled some responses to the deleted Top News article on the censored Chinese internet from anonymous users describing “nausea” in response to the potential comeback of the health code app.
“Don’t scare me like that – I’m close to tears,” one user lamented.
The reports appeared outside of Sichuan and Guanzhou, RFA added: “Another blogger on the same site, Qinghui Youmo, posted a number of screenshots of reappearing health codes from social media users across China, including Zhejiang, Tianjin, Hebei, Guangxi and Shaanxi.”
The original Top News article claimed that officials in Guangzhou denied that they had reactivated the application because “some aspects of the app had never been retired,” according to RFA. In addition, the outlet added, “Later media reports dismissed people’s concerns about the return of the Health Code app, citing officials as saying that the app had never entirely been taken offline, because it offers other health data services in addition to COVID-19 tracking and tracing.”
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