Time-Space Companions: Digital Surveillance, Social Management, and Abuse of Power During the Covid-19 Pandemic in China

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic research carried out during the 2022 Covid-19 surge in southern China, this paper examines the roll-out of a contact-tracing tool called the Time-Space Companion project. The project exemplifies a state effort to incorporate data-driven surveillance technology into the public health apparatus during the coronavirus outbreak. By exploring the definition, identification, and management of Time-Space Companions, the paper shows that the project was used to discipline Chinese citizens and shift public health responsibilities onto them by transforming daily life into sites of public health regulation, discipline, and criminalization. The project also exemplified an on-going state effort to leverage surveillance technologies for the purposes of social management. The paper draws attention to the social repercussions that resulted when technology offered a tempting tool to enhance the infrastructural and despotic powers of mundane state actors.

KEYWORDS:

• digital surveillance
• contact-tracing
• public health
• social control

Acknowledgements

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 In Chinese, 时空伴随者.

2 CCTV 2022.

3 Global Times 2021a.

4 The Chinese health apps were developed by Tencent and Alibaba for provinces and municipalities with different versions and specific functions tailored to each government’s needs. They were integrated as an applet within the WeChat and Alipay apps and often included a health code, along with an individual’s history of Covid test results, vaccination, and travel in the past fourteen days. Almost all Chinese with a smartphone had to have at least one local health app to perform their daily activities. The colors of a resident’s health code could be green, yellow, or red, indicating the risk level of a resident’s exposure to Covid-19 (Liang 2020; Zhou et al. 2021). Some places also incorporated a gray color to indicate a special category of Covid status. The city of Beijing used a pop-up system to indicate a person’s status when this could not be identified through colors. For instance, a pop-up widow No.3 was for companions, prompting them to get tested and stay at home unless they had such a status revoked through a procedure.

5 Global Times 2021a, 2021b.

6 Wen 2021.

7 These included but were not limited to the long-standing health code time-space companion project as demonstrated in this paper, and the venue code - a QR code that collected residents’ location information in real time when being scanned. For more on the former, see Liang 2020; Zhou et al. 2021; for the latter, see Chen 2023.

8 For more information on Ling County, please see section three.

9 Hoffman 2019; Batke and Ohlberg 2020.

10 Su, Xu and Cao 2021.

11 Byler 2022.

12 Bach 2019; Yan 2019; Lam 2021.

13 Mittelsteadt 2021; Chen and Greitens 2022; Gao and Cartier 2022.

14 Erie and Streinz 2021.

15 Batke and Ohlberg 2020.

16 Huang and Tsai 2022.

17 Bartz and Alper 2022; Chen, Mao, and Qiu 2018; Tarrow 2018.

18 Zuboff 2019, 384.

19 Wang 2020.

20 Wang 2020.

21 Byler 2019.

22 Cai 2020.

23 Cai 2020.

24 Ye 2020.

25 Gan 2022.

26 Singapore’s “TraceTogether” is a technological substitute for social trust. According to Stevens and Haines (2020), “Rather than linking people together via a network, the phone becomes a sensor through which to detect an invisible enemy in the body of another individual. In fact, the only way people can ultimately be linked is via the centralized authority (that is, when the Ministry of Health requests or requires contact tracing). The government remains the obligatory passage point in the network.”

27 Byler 2019.

28 Sadowski 2018.

29 Zhou and Xin 2021.

30 Primary organizations (jiceng) include street-level offices in urban areas.

31 Chen and Greitens 2022; Ren 2020; Tang 2018; Xiang 2020.

32 While a regular ten-person cluster Covid-19 test cost eight yuan per person, those provided through mass testing were free for residents.

33 US CDC 2022.

34 JEPCM 2021, 2022.

35 NHC and NATCM 2022.

36 Kai and Xin 2021.

37 The Health Commission of Guangdong Province 2022.

38 Wu 2022.

39 The State Council 2021, 2022.

40 NHC and NATCM 2022.

41 For examples, please refer to more than 62,000 responses to China CDC chief expert Zunyou Wu’s Weibo post. See Wu 2022.

42 Wu et al. 2020.

43 Gillespie 2018; Irani 2015, 2016.

44 Chen and Qiu 2019; Jacka 2014; Qiu 2009; Lukács 2020; Yan 2008.

45 Chen 2023.

46 Bloomberg News 2022a, 2022b.

47 Global Times 2021.

48 China News Weekly 2022.

49 China News Weekly 2022.

50 NOLE 2020.

51 Caijing Mobile 2020; Tong 2022.

52 Healthcare workers who were involved in initial Covid-19 prevention and control wore white hazmat suits, and were thus called “the great white.” Initially, this term was positively associated with respect for and approval of healthcare workers. Gradually however, everyone from healthcare workers and governmental personnel to local party cadres, security guards, and volunteers could wear white hazmat suits. The suits became representatives of excessive Covid-19 containment measures that caused harm to Chinese people, and people who wore them were at times considered government accomplices.

53 Graeber 2015; Herzfeld 1993.

54 Hu 2020.

55 Tong 2022.

56 China City News 2022.

57 Ye 2022.

58 Zhao 2022.

59 Hongxin News 2022.

60 Chen 2023.

61 Yan 2009.

62 Chen 2020; Chen 2023.

63 The fire occurred on November 24, 2022, in a residential high-rise apartment building. Graphic images and videos that circulated on social media showed residents asking for help and dying, while firemen and community personnel were removing physical barriers that prevented fire engines from reaching the building. Local government officials reported ten Uyghurs had died and nine were injured, and they ascribed the causalities partly to “weak preventative and self-rescue ability” of the residents. However, many Chinese believed that the physical barriers erected for Covid containment and private vehicles disabled to three months of restrictive lockdown inhibited timely evacuation and rescue, See Che and Chien 2022.

64 Mozur, Fu, and Chien 2022

65 Travel card requirements were rescinded as of December 14, 2022, and the health app was rescinded in February 2023 in Guangdong.

Additional information

Funding

This research was generously supported by the Society of Woman Geographers, and by the Department of Geography, Graduate School, and the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. This research was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Colorado Boulder with an approved protocol number of 19-0846.

Notes on contributors

Xiaoling Chen

Xiaoling Chen is a doctoral candidate in geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research focuses on health governance, digital surveillance, and civic engagement in China. Her dissertation explores ways in which China’s post-2009 healthcare reforms and Covid-19 policies transform spaces while changing human relationships.

Tim Oakes

Tim Oakes is a Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also the project director for “China Made: Asian Infrastructures and the ‘China Model’ of Development,” funded by The Henry Luce Foundation.