A worrying precedent in China: covid surveillance infrastructure used to suppress dissent
The Chinese government is showing what can be done with digital health passes combined with tests and vaccinations as conditions of access to buildings and transport. Anyone who displays unruly behaviour, for example by taking part in demonstrations, will simply have their health status defined as “dangerous”. Such procedures are no longer completely foreign to us. And the digital health pass is on its way to becoming a permanent instrument in the EU.
A report [1] of 14 June 2022 by the Reuters news agency, entitled “China bank protest stopped by health codes turning red, depositors say”, should lead those who still believe that the vaccine pass and its associated apps are benign and useful technological advances to reconsider their view.
The report explains how customers of three banks in central China, whose funds had been frozen, were prevented by the authorities from attending the protests because the authorities turned their health app red. Several customers reported this to the news agency. The provincial government and the Chinese Ministry of the Interior, contacted by Reuters, made no comment. The National Health Commission said that the use of health codes should not be extended without authorisation.
According to the report, customers from all over China wanted to travel to Henan province to protest against a nearly two-month freeze on access to deposits on account of a streamlining of internal banking processes.
What then happened is exactly what civil rights groups fear, and not only in China: the covid surveillance infrastructure was used to suppress dissent. In many provinces of China, a “green light” on the covid smartphone app is a precondition for access to public transport, restaurants and shopping centres, as well as to many other facilities.
“They have put digital handcuffs on us”, a bank customer told Reuters. After the bank customers registered their travel plans online, as required by the anti-covid restrictions, the covid apps suddenly turned red for many people. For others, they turned red after they identified themselves with the app at the site of the planned protests.
For the people concerned, this means not only that they cannot take part in the protests, but that they are punished for the mere intention, with the consequence that they can hardly move around their place of residence any more, not even to go to work.
The Chinese approach is just one notch harsher than ours
We cannot console ourselves with the thought that this can only happen in an authoritarian State like China. There are similar examples in supposedly liberal democracies. Remember how the Canadian government quashed the truckers' protests against the draconian anti-covid vaccination rules by declaring a state of emergency and freezing the bank accounts of all the truckers present and all their supporters. Had the Canadian government had a centralised digital access-control system as extensive as China's, it would certainly have preferred to use it to suppress the protests.
In Germany, people who wanted to protest against the health measures were deliberately deterred and latently criminalised through restrictions or, more often, outright bans on demonstrations, on the grounds of the risk of infection, while other, more “comfortable” demonstrations were approved with less rigid conditions.
The city of Ulm provided a particularly flagrant example of this in early 2022. It banned all demonstrations against the health measures on the pretext of the epidemic. In order to prevent impromptu “corona walks”, the city prescribed FFP2 masks throughout the city centre on Monday and Friday evenings.
This obligation to wear an FFP2 mask was gruelling, as these highly filtering masks make breathing outdoors or in a car more difficult. The authorities argued that this obligation served to make the police's work easier: critics of the health measures, being strongly reluctant to wear masks, would not do so and would therefore be easily identified as “troublemakers” [2].
In order to underline its binding nature, the order on compulsory mask-wearing expressly threatened any offender with recourse to physical force, up to and including the use of weapons.
Following my article [3], the City and the police authorities, visibly embarrassed, stated [4] that they would not shoot at unmasked people. A few days later, the City announced [5] that the threat of the use of force would be removed from the order. The obligation to wear a mask on walk days nevertheless remained in place.
From the Canadian example and from the way the anti-corona rules were used in Ulm and throughout Germany to suppress demonstrations, I draw the conclusion that, under the pretext of fighting a pandemic, a frightened population can easily be manipulated, even in so-called “liberal” democracies, into accepting surveillance and control capabilities, under the pretext of a health policy, aimed at preventing protests against the government.
The continuation of the digital vaccination certificate planned by the EU [6] – despite more than 380,000 mostly negative submissions [7] in an official citizens' consultation – and the global harmonisation of the vaccine pass, for which the company T-Systems has been commissioned [8], must therefore be regarded as measures with an extremely high potential for abuse. As the current example of China frighteningly shows, they allow very extensive and targeted control of citizens' actions.
By Norbert Häring [9], German economic analyst and journalist, editor and editorial director (Börsen-Zeitung, Financial Times Deutschland, Handelsblatt), member of the ECB Shadow Council, independent blogger and staunch defender of cash payment
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-bank-protest-stopped-by-health-codes-turning-red-depositors-say-2022-06-14/
[2] https://norberthaering.de/macht-kontrolle/ulm/
[3] Ibid.
[4] https://norberthaering.de/macht-kontrolle/ulm-pressemitteilung-schusswaffen/
[5] https://www.ulm.de/aktuelle-meldungen/z%C3%B6a/februar-2022/allgemeinverfuegung-aenderung-2022_02 (page no longer available)
[6] https://norberthaering.de/news/umfrage-covid-pass-verlaengerung/
[7] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/13375-Verlangerung-der-Verordnung-uber-das-digitale-COVID-Zertifikat-der-EU/feedback_de?p_id=27926341 (page no longer available)
[8] https://norberthaering.de/macht-kontrolle/t-systems-who/
[9] https://norberthaering.de/en/cv/
Link to the original website:
https://norberthaering.de
Original title: „China zeigt, wozu G-Regeln und Gesundheitspässe gut sind – zur totalen Kontrolle der Bevölkerung durch die Regierung“
Article translated from German by Colin Meier
Photo source:
Montage of an image by Colin Meier and a resized image byAndrey Belenko on flickr, CC BY 2.0
Quotations from English-language sources are translated back here from the French.
