CNN
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Liu, a 39-year-old technical worker in Beijing, arrived in the central city of Zhengzhou on Sunday with all the boxes to travel under China’s strict rules. covid Sanctions.
He had tested negative for Covid-19 a day earlier; His hotel had confirmed that he could be checked in; And this health code on their phone app was green – meaning he had not come into contact with people or places at risk and was therefore free to travel.
But when Liu scanned a local QR code to exit the Zhengzhou train station, his health code flashed red—a nightmare for any traveler. ChinaWhere freedom of movement is strictly determined by a color-code system imposed by the government to control the spread of the virus.
Anyone with a red code – usually assigned to people infected with COVID or considered by authorities to be at high risk of infection – immediately becomes a person non greta. They are banned from all public places and transport, and are often subject to weeks of government quarantine.
All that plan went awry for Liu, who arrived in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of Henan province, who sought redress from the bank that had frozen his deposits. He had put his life savings – about 6 million yuan ($890,000) in total – in a rural bank in Henan, and has not been able to withdraw a penny since April.
Over the past two months, thousands of depositors like Liu have been struggling to recover their savings from at least four rural banks in Henan – in a case involving billions of dollars. At the end of May, hundreds of them traveled to Zhengzhou from all over China and protested outside the Henan banking regulator’s office to ask for their money back – to no avail.
Another protest was planned for Monday. But as soon as the depositors arrived in Zhengzhou, they were stunned to see that their health codes – which were green at departure – had turned red, according to six people who spoke with CNN and a social media post.
Dozens of depositors were taken to a quarantine hotel guarded by police and local authorities, before being sent on trains to their hometowns the next day; According to witnesses and online posts, others were “quarantined” at several other places in the city, including the college campus.
The depositors accused Zhengzhou officials of tampering with the health code system to prevent them from returning to the city – and thus thwarting their plans for their rights.
“The health code should have been used to prevent the spread of the epidemic, but now it has deviated from its original role and has become like a good citizen’s certificate,” said Qiu, a depositor from eastern Jiangsu province.
Qiu, a teacher, did not go to Henan to protest, but his health code also turned red on Sunday evening after scanning a QR code from Zhengzhou. He said a fellow depositor had shared a picture of the Zhengzhou QR code on the WeChat messaging app, in an effort to find out whether depositors outside Henan were also affected.
It looks like the red code only targets depositors. Qiu used his wife’s phone to scan the QR code, and it turned green, he said. “I called the government hotline in Zhengzhou to complain about my red code, and they told me there was some error in the Big Data information database.”
Both Liu and Qiu asked to be identified only by their surnames.
CNN has reached out to the Zhengzhou government for comment. Henan Provincial Health Commission told official news website thepaper.cn It was “investigating and verifying” complaints from depositors who received red codes.
The alleged abuse of power created an uproar on social media.
“Now (authorities) can block you from filing a petition by giving you a direct digital bond, aka a red code,” said a comment on China’s Twitter-like platform Weibo.
Hu Zijin, former editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a state-run nationalist tabloid, Weibo. but said Local governments should not use the health code for any purpose other than epidemic prevention.
“If a locality tries to restrict the movement of certain people by controlling its health code for other purposes, it is not only a clear violation of the COVID prevention laws and regulations, but also the credibility of the health code and the public’s risk of exposure to the pandemic. Support would be put at risk. Prevention,” Hu wrote on Tuesday. “It will do more harm than good to our social governance.”
Rights groups have long warned that China’s ubiquitous COVID surveillance and tracking network could be used by authorities to target individuals and groups for political reasons, such as stifling dissent.
Last November, Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer in the southern city of Changsha, said on twitter that his health code turned red that morning when he was about to fly to Shanghai to visit his mother zhang zhannoa citizen journalist prisoner For reporting on China’s initial coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.
“The health code, like many algorithm-based systems in China and around the world, lacks transparency. Exactly how the companies designed the app and what criteria they use to classify people is not clear… Allows it to be tampered with,” said Maya Wang, a human rights researcher who has studied China’s digital surveillance.
“The ambiguity of the health code, its ability to arbitrarily control people’s movement, while giving people few means to effectively appeal the app’s decisions, make it a particularly humiliating system.”
From the Zhengzhou train station, Beijing’s depositor Liu was taken to a room where several other passengers with red health codes were present.
There, he met another depositor who had come from Anyang, another city in Henan, and then the two of them were taken by police to a quarantine hotel. By evening, about 40 depositors – all with red health codes – had ended up at the hotel, and were asked to stay there for the night.
The next afternoon, he was allowed to leave the hotel and return to Beijing – accompanied by police and local officials until he boarded the train. They were exempted from scanning any QR codes on the way – as their code was still red and as per the rules of COVID, they were not allowed to enter the train station, let alone travel.
On Tuesday, as news and anger about red health codes spread online, some depositors said their health codes were green again.
By late afternoon, Liu’s code was also green, but he said he wanted accountability.
“The officers who took the decision (to tamper with the health code system) and executed the policy should be punished according to the law,” he said. “But I am not very optimistic about it. The power of the government is too cynical.”