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The “Yu-Giving Red Code” incident has caused great public opinion and has been criticized by the whole society, from the central government to the local government, from the government to the media, regardless of their position, the vast majority of them hold a critical attitude. On June 22, the Zhengzhou Commission for Discipline Inspection issued a report on accountability. Feng Xianbin, executive deputy secretary of the Political and Legal Committee of the Zhengzhou Municipal Party Committee, director of the Social Management and Control Guidance Department of the Epidemic Prevention and Control Headquarters, and a deputy decided to issue a red code to some village bank depositors. Zhao Yong, director of the Stability Maintenance Guidance Department of the Political and Legal Committee, and others performed the code assignment.
According to public information, Feng Xianbin is responsible for social stability and the handling of major mass incidents. He is in charge of the public security detachment, special police detachment, etc. There are also staff from the Political and Legal Committee’s Stability Maintenance Guidance Department among the executives. Therefore, this “Yu Fu Red Code” is indeed like the public. As feared, it was used to maintain stability.
The establishment of health code
In other countries, the establishment of health codes is very difficult and requires a series of prerequisites. First of all, the integration of the data required by the health code is very difficult. This difficulty includes several levels: First, the integrity of the original data, such as the basic population database, many countries do not have a unified ID card, and it is impossible to identify everyone on the data. In a city, the population flows frequently, and it is difficult to accurately grasp the actual resident population in the administrative area at a certain point in time. Second, the data is scattered in different government departments and different commercial institutions, and the interests of departments and commercial interests will hinder the opening of data, which seems to be a bad thing, but protects personal privacy (the cost of obtaining comprehensive information of a person is higher for any institution ). Third, these data directly describe the whereabouts and behavior of specific individuals. In general countries, it is very difficult to apply for use even for individual investigations. The data of tens of millions of people in a city is aggregated and processed. It’s more difficult.
In China, these barriers are much lower. China has a tradition of registering households and people. In the past decade or so, a citizen has been assigned a resident ID number since he was born and registered for a household registration. The widely used real-name system makes it possible to identify an individual’s life history and daily behavior based on the ID number, such as household registration. Relocation, mass transportation (train, plane), accommodation, operator access to the network, enrollment, medical insurance, property registration, etc. These data were originally scattered in different administrative departments. For example, population data are scattered in the health department, population department, and public security department, and they are not connected to each other.
In the past decade, there have been two rounds of shocks that have played a major role in the cross-sectoral integration of data. First, under the dual drive of central pressure and local innovation, convenience measures such as “running once” and “one-stop service” have been launched nationwide. A lot of data has been integrated at the national level, such as the basic information database of the national population. On this database, various departments carry out operations, such as the registration of marriages in different places of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, subsistence allowances assistance, social security card issuance of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, endowment insurance management, health plan Commission cross-provincial medical insurance, Ministry of Education student status online query. The connotation of allowing more data to travel is to break through the situation of data segmentation in administrative departments. Big data management departments have been established in various places to integrate the data owned by various departments. The advantage of this is that it does save a few times to do things, but the cost is that citizens become transparent people in the face of big data, and the cost for the government to obtain comprehensive privacy information of citizens is very low.
Even so, it is difficult to fully handle this private information. The new crown epidemic is an opportunity. The epidemic prevention general mobilization model has greatly eliminated the constraints of the formal system, greatly reducing the barriers to data integration and user resistance, and greatly reducing the institutional threshold for data integration and data processing. At this time, it is possible to integrate the operator data managed by the industry and information department and the medical and drug purchase testing data managed by the health department.
Secondly, the birth of health codes also requires mobile applications with extremely high penetration rate. In the past ten years, smartphones have covered the vast majority of adults, and at the same time they have also competed with several super apps, such as WeChat and Alipay. At this time, only the last step is left, and each mobile phone is real-named and corresponds to each person one by one.
In the development of mobile Internet, third-party payment has become the most dazzling industry. In order to compete for payment entrance, Alipay and WeChat have carried out large-scale subsidies and cultivated the market. Especially during this period coincided with the rise of taxi software, Alipay and WeChat encouraged users to bind bank cards by subsidizing the fare. During the process of binding the card, a name is required , ID number, bank card number and mobile phone number (the mobile phone bound to the bank card number) is already a four-factor real-name verification, which indirectly realizes the real-name of super APP users. In the process of promoting the application of these two apps, they also continue to subsidize users, sweep the streets, and push the ground to increase the installation rate and daily activity.
The real-name super APP technically makes the large-scale implementation of health codes possible. The two earliest cities where the health code was born were Hangzhou and Shenzhen, which are also the cities where the two super apps are located. Most of the various health codes launched in major cities are based on these two super apps.
On the whole, the all-powerful government and developed mobile Internet applications are both indispensable, which together gave birth to the health code.
The “innovation” of health codes
The health code is a brand-new social management mechanism, and its “innovation” is unprecedented. First of all, the essence of the health code is a coercive measure that restricts personal freedom. The danger of the red code and the yellow code is that personal freedom can be restricted with “unnecessary” reasons. This completely breaks through the basic principles of “no suspicion of guilt” and “presumption of innocence”, and breaks through the protection of citizens’ personal rights by laws such as the Legislation Law and the Administrative Compulsory Law.
Taking the “Henan Province Health Code Assignment Rules (Second Edition)” as an example, a person being assigned a red code means that he or she will be subject to centralized isolation and management. The “home quarantine” of the yellow code cannot leave the house, which is equivalent to residential surveillance.
The “Legislation Law” stipulates that the “coercive measures and punishments restricting personal freedom” can only be stipulated by law, and the “Administrative Coercive Law” stipulates that the administrative coercive measures restricting the personal freedom of citizens are set by law. Article 39 of the “Law on the Prevention and Treatment of Infectious Diseases” requires isolation and treatment of infected persons, suspected and close contacts of Class A infectious diseases, and Article 41 requires the isolation of persons in places where Class A infectious diseases occur.
In reality, the scope of isolation management is greatly expanded. In the current code assignment rules in Henan, people who come from abroad and reside in high-risk areas will be assigned red codes, but most of them are not positive in the end. Time and space companions will also be assigned a yellow code. If they are in the same confined space, they will be assigned a red code. This greatly expands the scope of the “place” in the “Law on the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases”. The “time” of the operation may be more than ten minutes, and the scope of the “space” may be an area of 0.8km*0.8km. The population affected by this operation may be as high as tens of thousands of people.
Henan’s experience is not an isolated case, it is widely implemented all over the country. On June 21, Minhang District of Shanghai implemented a 7-day closed management (staying at home) + 7-day home health monitoring (not leaving the community) for the enclosed area of Qibao Town Outer Ring Expressway, Wuzhong Road, Beihengjing, and Shanghai-Chongqing Expressway. And to do several nucleic acid tests for all staff. There are more than 10 neighborhood committees and more than 30 communities in this area, and the number of people may be tens of thousands. Most of these communities are not even considered as medium-risk areas, but their personal freedom is restricted. On June 22, Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone (Yizhuang) added 3 new positive cases. Therefore, 161 people were determined to be in close contact, and 77,388 high-risk visitors were assigned a code and a pop-up window. The close contacts will be quarantined in a centralized manner, and more than 70,000 people Being popped up means not being able to go out. This is still the case in Beijing and Shanghai, and other areas can be imagined. According to the current risk level in Beijing and Shanghai, the number of positives in these groups is likely to be single digits, which means that only one positive case can be found by limiting the freedom of tens of thousands of people.
This red-yellow code assignment mechanism greatly increases the uncertainty of ordinary people. “When people sit at home, the green code turns into a red code” is a common encounter. The scope of the “unnecessary” transcoding mechanism may be very wide. For example, a city can be “silent” as a whole (staying at home), and the purchase of anti-cold medicine will be popped up, because of a positive test in the street (district or county). Infected people are sitting together, unable to go out to other areas. The basis of these policies is only the red-headed documents of the local health department, or the interpretation of some provisions of the “Infectious Disease Prevention and Control Law” by the executive personnel. The judiciary defines it, and allows the administrative agency to arbitrarily expand the scope of application of coercion.
Secondly, the red-yellow-green code actually conducts hierarchical management of the crowd. When the health code came out, Dr. Zha Yunfei from Zhejiang University pointed out in his paper that the act of generating the health code is an administrative rating, and the process of generating it is automated administration. By changing the coding rules, specific groups of people can be transcoded into red and yellow codes in batches to achieve the purpose of restricting personal freedom. Therefore, the health code has become a de facto crowd grading tool.
The history of this kind of crowd classification tool is not uncommon in recent decades. Whether it is the social credit system or class composition, it has played a similar role, systematically restricting the rights of some groups or excluding these people through the system. In contrast, the health code has a wider impact and is more powerful. The untrustworthy persons subject to enforcement cannot take the second-class and above cabins on planes, trains, and ships. Residents with red and yellow codes cannot even go out.
The Legacy of Health Codes
Combing past social management policies, the following cycle is basically presented: the impact of unexpected events has spawned the need for emergency safety prevention and control. After the accident is over, the emergency safety prevention and control measures have not been withdrawn, but have become normalized. Here On the basis, the next unexpected event was encountered, which gave birth to the need for safety prevention and control in a more emergency state. The subway security check, which was launched in extraordinary times such as the Olympic Games and the World Expo, has become the standard configuration of subways in various cities; the real-name system for train tickets to block scalpers has been extended to disciplinary tools for dishonest persons; more basic and extensive is the real-name system for mobile phones and the Internet, the Internet management and face recognition. To a certain extent, China’s normalized daily security prevention and control strategy is stricter than the wartime emergency in Europe and the United States. Judging from the propaganda slogan, some local governments in China do claim to respond to the epidemic in a “wartime” state.
As an exogenous shock, the epidemic has fully integrated cross-departmental personal privacy data. The public has to face an era of social governance in which individuals are restrained by algorithms and personal data. This is the most important legacy of the epidemic on the social management and control system.
After the advent of the health code, many institutions have begun to consider the future of the health code or try to expand the scope of application. For example, in May 2020, Hangzhou promoted the normalized utilization plan of health codes, linking users’ health indicators with the color of health codes to establish personal health evaluation; On the basis of the “Civilization Code”, the civilization points are displayed through “one person, one code”. These actions all caused public opinion, but they did not come to fruition in the end.
Others suggest that after the epidemic is over, the health code should be transformed into a city code. Health codes have been expanded in many fields, such as binding medical insurance cards and integrating with QR codes for subway and bus rides. If health codes continue to expand in daily life in the future, it will also mean subways, buses and other public transportation and events. The real-name system in activities and other fields has also been realized. In addition, social management tools such as digital sentinels and face recognition entering communities have been implemented in many cities. These policies all faced considerable resistance before the epidemic.
We should also see that although the “Yuci Red Code” has been severely criticized by the public opinion, there are many voices in the public opinion caused by the beating case at the Tangshan barbecue restaurant. After other vicious incidents cannot be ruled out, public opinion begins to accept the use of a similar QR code assignment mechanism to automatically restrict individual rights.
Perhaps, each of us can thank Zhengzhou for bringing a common concern to the public eye. It has always been politically correct to sacrifice the rights of a few high-risk groups to protect the lives of the majority. This “minority-majority” and “rights-security” dichotomy can be seen everywhere in related discussions. For most people, the answer is obvious: the safety of the majority comes first, the rights of the few can be sacrificed, and they always feel like they are the majority, not the minority.
There are two errors in this view. First, in the decision-making and implementation process of policies such as health codes, there is no public participation, no hearings, and there is little public discussion between experts and public media. Whether the transfer of personal rights can serve the overall situation of epidemic prevention is even less causal, so there is no causal relationship. Citizens trade rights for health tradeoffs.
Second, everyone will become a minority, and “Yuci Red Code” vividly demonstrates this risk. Only a few people will care about the depositors of Henan Rural Banks, but everyone has a health code, and the “Yuci Red Code” deeply empathizes with everyone. In a person’s life, there are multiple roles, they may be the parents of primary school students, they may be patients, they may be depositors or financial consumers, they may be the owners of real estate in the old city, and they are the majority when it comes to enrolling children in compulsory education. The faction is the majority when it comes to the conflict between doctors and patients, but it may be the minority when it comes to compensation for house demolition and relocation in the old city.
The reality that everyone has the potential to become a minority requires that we must protect the “rights of the minority” and should not arbitrarily regard the health code as a “stability maintenance code” as the bottom line. In the longer term, health codes must be completely abolished, and any policy that restricts personal freedom with QR codes is prohibited.
(This article only represents the author’s own views, editor in charge: Yan Man [email protected])