Are Chinese people “comfortable with outright surveillance” ( Huang, 2020) by the state, or tolerant of the government’s digital measures that would lead to the infringement of privacy rights and freedoms while stemming the epidemic? If so, why? As illustrated in the Weibo remark above, Chinese people seem to consent to the government’s expansive virus-tracking policy ( Mozur et al., 2020 see also Yang et al., 2020). Yet, compared to the increased concern elsewhere (Sweeney, 2020), there is little public resistance and criticism domestically about technology-related privacy and surveillance risks during the pandemic in China. Not without controversy, the surveillance system has prompted a storm of international concern and criticism of the invasive technologies used by an authoritarian regime in ways that could trample the right to privacy and data protection and repressively curb other fundamental civil and human rights ( Huang, 2020 Singer & Sang-Hun, 2020). A slew of surveillance systems-from drones to CCTV cameras, from digital barcodes to geospatial information on mobile apps-have established the country’s extensive, aggressive virus-tracking system (e.g., Huang, 2020 Wall Street Journal, 2020 Wu et al., 2020). Among countries that have introduced pandemic-related surveillance, China is a remarkable example that has mustered the digital contact tracing and health surveillance resources at its disposal to mitigate the effects of the virus to a significant extent ( Cadell, 2020 Wu et al., 2020). This is largely due to the deployment of technological surveillance and tracking measures worldwide to help slow the spread of the disease (e.g., Ram & Gray, 2020 Singer & Sang-Hun, 2020). The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic not only poses unprecedented threats to global health and human well-being but also raises significant concerns about data and privacy breaches. China’s actions shed light on the general acceptance of the handover of personal data for anti-epidemic purposes in East Asian societies like South Korea and Singapore.ġ. China’s high-tech war against COVID-19. We interrogate the longer-term trajectories-including the guardian model of governance, sociotechnical imagination of technology, and communitarian values-by which the understanding of technology and privacy in times of crisis has been shaped. Drawing on academic research and a semantic network analysis of media frames, we explore the contextual political and cultural belief systems that determine public support for authorities’ ever-expanding access to personal data. However, there is little domestic public resistance in China about technology-related privacy risks during the pandemic. Critics worldwide believe these invasive technologies, in the hands of an authoritarian regime, could trample the right to privacy and curb fundamental civil and human rights. 952-970.China’s unprecedented measures to mobilize its diverse surveillance apparatus played a key part in the country’s successful containment of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. (2019), "Datafication, dataveillance, and the social credit system as China’s new normal", Online Information Review, Vol. The author is thankful to the reviewers and editors for their constructive comments. Thus, these phenomena necessitate discussion of its consequences for, and applications by, the Chinese state and businesses, as well as affected individuals’ efforts to adapt to the system. The Chinese social credit system has growing recognition and importance as both a governing tool and a part of everyday datafication and dataveillance processes. This study builds upon an ongoing debate and an emerging body of literature on datafication, dataveillance and digital sociology while filling empirical gaps in the study of the global South.
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