In One Chinese City, Protesters Find Themselves Thwarted by a Red Health Code - The Wall Street Journal

By

Wenxin Fan

HONG KONG—Ye Mijian had gone to the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou to join a protest against some local banks that had frozen his and others’ deposits. The protest plan was thwarted after his health code, which authorities use to track Covid-19 risks, and that of many other would-be protesters turned red.

Mr. Ye said that as soon as he arrived in Zhengzhou and scanned the code on his smartphone to exit from the train station, his green code switched color, prompting local officials to confine him in a hotel. Two days later, when he left the region without having been able to carry out his protest plan, the code flipped back to green, he said.

Mr. Ye’s experience echoes accounts by other customers who had been petitioning against four rural banks in the region accused of financial misconduct. Their experience prompted a broad outpouring of concern on Chinese social media as well as in state publications that authorities in Zhengzhou and the surrounding Henan province were using the health code for social control.

Authorities in Zhengzhou and Henan haven’t provided an official explanation of why the codes of Mr. Ye and others were switched and then switched back. Neither Zhengzhou nor provincial authorities responded to requests for comment.

In between the change of colors, Mr. Ye and others say dozens of bank customers who had come to Zhengzhou to protest and whose health codes had also turned red were grounded inside a remote hotel. For Mr. Ye, the setting was familiar. In May, he said, he spent some time confined at the same hotel by local authorities after he and hundreds of bank customers held signs outside the local headquarters of the bank regulator, demanding the return of their savings.

“Last time, we were taken here after we managed to stage a street protest,” he said, lamenting that on this visit he didn’t get farther than the train station. “This time, I couldn’t move an inch.”

By midweek, similar accounts posted on Chinese social media, with screenshots of the red labels included, prompted the hashtag #Henan Red Code# to go viral on the Twitter-like Weibo platform. Many who posted about it criticized Zhengzhou and Henan authorities, accusing them of using the health codes for other purposes than the intended ones and likening the codes to digital shackles.

“If other cities follow this kind of abuse, there will be nothing left to the rule of law,” Wang Cailiang, a Beijing lawyer, said on his Weibo account.

In a sign of apparent central-government displeasure with Henan and Zhengzhou authorities, state media broadly reported the incident and the public outrage, while several Communist Party outlets published blunt criticisms.

“Obviously such an operation is the opposite of common sense, rule of law and axiom,” said a commentary on Tuesday in one of the social-media accounts run by the official People’s Daily.

In response to an inquiry about the protesters’ experience in Zhengzhou, China’s National Health Commission said that the health codes are designed strictly for Covid, adding, “It is absolutely not allowed to apply factors that are not related to disease control.”

China’s color-labeled health codes, embedded in smartphone apps shortly after the pandemic began in early 2020, track people’s movements and Covid test results. Linked to a person’s identification details, the codes become digital passes that authorities can use to control people’s day-to-day movements. Once a code turns red, authorities can take measures, such as taking the person to a quarantine facility.

“They effectively give each resident a risk credit rating,” Hu Yong, a Peking University scholar, wrote in March in an essay about data ownership.

Overseas researchers and human-rights activists have warned of risks of privacy breaches as authorities incorporate the codes into China’s digital-surveillance system. The Chinese Foreign Ministry dismissed such concerns in July 2020, saying the system helps control health risks while protecting individual privacy.

The Chinese public has generally made few objections to sacrificing some personal privacy during the pandemic, and many have grown accustomed to showing the codes wherever they go, though recently many have expressed fatigue with lockdowns and having to regularly line up for tests.

In May, shortly after the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission said that four Henan lenders were involved in what China terms illicit public fundraising, a financial crime, hundreds of customers went to Zhengzhou to try to get their money back.

A regulatory investigation is under way, the official Xinhua News Agency reported in May. The four banks have made no public statements regarding the probe on their official accounts on the WeChat social-media platform and didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

One bank depositor said that while he was in Zhengzhou with his girlfriend in May, his health code turned red while hers stayed green. He said local officials called and urged him to leave town. After he showed them departure train tickets, the code switched back to green as he said the officials had promised.

Some depositors suspect that they had been identified as potential protesters after they logged their complaints about the bank to get authorities to help recover their money.

Max Zhang, an engineer living in another province, found his health code flipped to red earlier this week, with a line saying it had been flipped by Henan authorities remotely. Mr. Zhang said he had deposited 700,000 yuan, equivalent to around $104,000 with the rural banks, including inheritance money from his deceased mother, but wasn’t planning to go to Zhengzhou.

Without a green health code, he said, he was in a quandary over how to get into an auto-repair shop to get his car fixed—and ended up pretending he had forgotten his phone at home to gain access to the shop. His code is now back to green.

When Xu Zhihao, a depositor from Tianjin, received his red code in Zhengzhou, he was forced to spend a night at a university library before being escorted onto a return train the next day by local officials, he said.

As soon as he showed the red code, the train attendant put on protective gear and evacuated the passengers around him. He got the green code back once the train left Henan province, but that didn’t help his status on the train.

“The passengers gave me that weird look the whole journey,” he said.

—Qianwei Zhang contributed to this article.

Write to Wenxin Fan at Wenxin.Fan@wsj.com

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