China’s anti-COVID ‘app’: weapon to restrict dissidents’ travel?

The anti-COVID health code on Chinese lawyer Xie Yang’s cell phone changed from normal green to dangerous red shortly before he set out on a trip to Shanghai to visit the mother of Zhang Zhan, a now-incarcerated woman who reported from Wuhan of the early stages of the pandemic.

The color change prevented Xie from even accessing the Changsha airport (in the center of the country), at whose entrance he had to show, through a mobile tracking application, that he had not been in risk areas or in contact with infected by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

Hours before the trip, on the night of November 5, two police officers had tried to dissuade Xie from the trip. “Orders from above,” they alleged, without managing to change the lawyer’s determination.

Hours after the incident at the airport, on the morning of November 7, his code was back in the color attributed to hope, but by then there was nothing to do.

The human rights defender organization Amnesty International (AI) says it is the first time that it is aware of pandemic tracking mobile applications being used to make it difficult for dissidents to travel.

Without explanation

“The health ‘app’ is a scientific matter. It should not be manipulated by the bandits of the Communist Party of China as a tool to restrict the mobility of dissidents ”, Xie protested at that time through his social networks, messages that were accompanied by screenshots of his code.

“In China, politicians are above all,” explains the lawyer, three days after the event. They are perfectly capable of changing the data on the (health) platform. As I refused to agree to the request of the Police, I think they were the ones who changed my data on the platform ”.

The hours the code colors changed also coincided with the trip. “It is easy to deduce that it was them,” he says.

But he did not limit himself to deducing, but he went to the Municipal Health Commission on November 8 to ask for an explanation.

“I wanted to know how that could have happened on a technical level. Did I get within eight meters of a risk area or an infected one? ”, He says.

Xie says that his code was green the day before going to the airport, and that he had not been in any of the areas declared of medium or high risk of COVID-19, nor in contact with any person with symptoms.

In addition, the Changsha Municipal Sanitation Commission confirmed that the city – which Xie says he did not leave in the previous two weeks – was not declared at the time as a medium or high risk area for contagion.

After the period to which the Health Commission had agreed to provide explanations, they said that there was no information that they could provide in this regard.

Similar situations

Also lawyer Wang Yu suffered a similar situation on the same dates: the Beijing health application did not allow her to access the system for a while and, afterwards, did not allow her to detail her actual travel itinerary.

The capital’s health ‘app’ required him to enter the places visited in the last 14 days, a standard procedure when traveling, except that the only options available were places with outbreaks, so if he selected them, he would have been banned. immediately upon entering the Chinese capital.

“The sanitary code is a tool to manipulate people and maintain stability,” Wang said ironically on Twitter.

Her husband, Bao Longjun, had no better luck in those same days trying to return to Beijing from the eastern city of Suzhou.

Bao denounced through Twitter that the only option that the application allowed him to choose was Changzhou, a town that was then considered an epidemic risk by COVID-19.

“But I have never been to Changzhou,” Bao said. “I won’t be able to go back (to Beijing) if I fill out the form like this. After filing a (telephone) complaint, they removed Changzhou (as the only eligible destination). But now I have a yellow code ”, with which movements are restricted and the individual should be quarantined at home.

New restrictions?

“It is the first time that we have evidence of cases in which the (Chinese) government is using the health ‘app’ to restrict the movements of human rights defenders,” they say from AI.

“However,” the organization warns, “the authorities have long used the nominal registration system to track down human rights defenders or to restrict their movements.”

“There are cases in which they have not been able to travel because the authorities included their names in the ‘restricted list’ of the database,” explains an AI spokesman. “As a result, they were unable to use the train ticketing system.” And they had to stay on land.