A recent video from Shanghai shows three police officers in a subway compartment. They go through all passengers, demand their phones and check them for images of protests, foreign apps or VPN technology to circumvent Chinese censorship. They mainly target students and migrant workers, according to leaked police instructions, the groups most likely to demonstrate. The agents remove apps and protest images, register the phone owners and threaten punishment.
These are practices, without any legal basis, that have long been commonplace in China – not in Shanghai, but in Xinjiang, the border region where at least a million Uyghurs have been detained in re-education camps in recent years under the guise of counter-terrorism. Xinjiang is so crammed with checkpoints and facial recognition cameras that the entire region is like an open-air prison. Due to the strict repression, little information is released.
The protests of the past week, and the repression that followed, confirm a long-held fear in China: that the Xinjiang model is gradually being adopted across China. The freedom restrictions of the zero-covid policy, against which students and local residents demonstrated in more than twenty cities, show great parallels with ‘anti-terror measures’ in Xinjiang. And the repression with which the protests are dealt with comes directly from Xinjiang practice.
The protests also show that many Chinese disagree with this restriction of their freedom, but can do little about it. After years of perfecting in Xinjiang, the authoritarian techno-surveillance state now reigns supreme.
Social contract
The basis of Chinese authoritarianism is often described as a social contract. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) demands submission from its people in exchange for prosperity and security. It is a deal that subordinates individual rights to collective interests, often at the expense of minorities such as the Uyghurs. But the majority of the dominant ethnic group, the Han Chinese, long agreed.
The zero-covid policy also fitted into that social contract. The freedom of the Chinese people was limited by lockdowns, quarantines and travel restrictions, but this was offset by two years of protection of human life and a relatively intact economy. The majority – those who escaped the worst lockdowns – were satisfied. Until the much more contagious omikron variant landed in China at the beginning of this year and the zero-covid policy started to spin.
Suddenly many Chinese saw the downside of an authoritarian government that wants to keep everything under control. He wanted to contain the omikron virus, at all costs. Shanghai went into lockdown for months; entire neighborhoods, companies and campuses had to be quarantined because of a handful of infections, millions of people were taken to quarantine centers. The economy plunged into the depths, residents feared the quarantine more than the virus. The social contract was broken.
Quarantine camps
All of China discovered what Xinjiang already knew: When the CCP sees a danger, the party tends to fire. In Xinjiang, after terror attacks, an entire population group was labeled a potential threat. For the least, Uyghurs are sent to re-education camps. Under the zero-covid policy, people are locked up in ‘quarantine camps’ at the slightest risk of infection, as critics call the quarantine centers. Last month, the number of ‘close contacts’ rose to 1.3 million.
Just like in Xinjiang, a whole security infrastructure has been set up in zero-covid China, with fences, barriers and entrance gates with facial recognition cameras. Digital health codes give police endless surveillance options, helping to track down the past week’s protesters.
To keep the economy afloat, the government placed large companies in “closed-loop systems,” where employees could have no contact with the outside world for weeks. When workers at iPhone manufacturer Foxconn fled, local governments were ordered to fill the empty jobs. Riots over late bonus payments were crushed by the police. That raises questions about the voluntary nature of that labor, just like in Xinjiang.
The repression is much more severe in Xinjiang than in the rest of China. But the zero-covid policy has made it clear to China’s middle class that they too can fall prey to “meaningless political campaigns driven by paranoia, insecurity and authoritarian excess” – as New York Timescolumnist Li Yuan described. The fact that the protests broke out after a fire in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, in which Uyghur were killed, shows some solidarity.
Easing and repression
Meanwhile, Xinjiang’s technosurveillance is being rolled out across China. Residents in Beijing, Guangzhou and Chengdu also reported this week that police stopped them on the street for telephone checks. The management of Tsinghua University in Beijing warned students that they could be caught remotely if they use VPN technology. Apple was forced to limit its Airdrop feature. The safety net becomes inescapable.
With relaxation of the zero-covid policy, the Chinese government is simultaneously trying to restore the social contract. However, this does not happen with a transparent exit strategy, but with a jumble of local and sometimes contradictory measures. In this way, the Chinese population, with limited vaccinations and unprepared, threatens to stumble into a serious covid outbreak. Fudan University in Shanghai calculated that up to 1.6 million people could die.
The zero covid policy will eventually go away, but not the fences and barriers, the health codes and phone checks. China will permanently resemble Xinjiang.