How big data is dividing the public in China’s coronavirus fight – green, yellow, red
- Cutting-edge technologies and old-fashioned surveillance are being used to decide who can and who can’t go back to work
- But the smart technology is not always that intelligent
This article was written by Viola Zhou and originally appeared in Inkstone, a daily digest of China-focused stories.
On Valentine’s Day, a 36-year-old lawyer Matt Ma in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang discovered he had been coded “red”.
Without a green light from the system, Ma could not travel from his ancestral hometown of Lishui to his new home city of Hangzhou, which is now surrounded by checkpoints set up to contain the epidemic.
Ma is one of the millions of people whose movements are being choreographed by the government through software that feeds on troves of data and issues orders that effectively dictate whether they must stay in or can go to work.
“This kind of massive use of technology is unprecedented,” said Christos Lynteris, a medical anthropologist at the University of St Andrews who has studied epidemics in China.