One of the very first goals of totalitarian dictatorships is to dissolve and suppress any and all human solidarity between its subjects by annexing all relations within the Party organizations (cf. the Nazi "co-ordination" or Gleichschaltung), and thereby installing a system of Terror whereby isolated individuals cut off from all social bonds are asked to become informants of the all-powerful Party State. The obvious frightful result is that civil society is totally disintegrated. - With consequences for its poor subjects too distressful and awful to enumerate here.
China, Desperate to Stop Coronavirus, Turns Neighbor
Against Neighbor
The authorities hunt for people from Wuhan, the center of
the outbreak, encouraging citizens to inform on others. Even those without
symptoms are being ostracized.
By Paul Mozur
·
Published Feb. 3,
2020Updated Feb. 4, 2020, 12:38 a.m. ET
GUANGZHOU, China — One person was
turned away by hotel after hotel after he showed his ID card. Another was
expelled by fearful local villagers. A third found his most sensitive personal
information leaked online after registering with the authorities.
These outcasts are from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province,
where a rapidly spreading viral outbreak has killed more
than 420 people in China and sent fear rippling around the world. They are
pariahs in China, among the millions unable to go home and feared as potential
carriers of the mysterious coronavirus.
All across the country, despite China’s
vast surveillance network with its facial recognition systems and high-end cameras that is increasingly used to
track its 1.4 billion people, the government has turned to familiar
authoritarian techniques — like setting up dragnets and asking neighbors to
inform on one another — as it tries to contain the outbreak.
It
took the authorities about five days to contact Harmo Tang, a college student
studying in Wuhan, after he returned to his hometown, Linhai, in eastern
Zhejiang Province. Mr. Tang said he had already been under self-imposed
isolation when local officials asked for his personal information, including
name, address, phone number, identity card number and the date he returned from
Wuhan. Within days, the information began to spread online, along with a list
of others who returned to Linhai from Wuhan.
Local officials offered no explanation
but returned a few days later to fasten police tape to his door and hang a sign
that warned neighbors that a Wuhan returnee lived there. The sign included an
informant hotline to call if anyone saw him or his family leave the apartment.
Mr. Tang said he received about four calls a day from different local
government departments.
“In reality there’s not much empathy,”
he said. “It’s not a caring tone they’re using. It’s a warning tone. I don’t
feel very comfortable about it.”
Of
course, China has a major incentive to track down potential carriers of the
disease. The coronavirus outbreak has put parts of the country under lockdown, brought the world’s second-largest
economy to a virtual standstill and erected walls between China and the rest of the world.
Still,
even some government officials called for understanding as concerns about
prejudice spread. Experts warned such marginalization of an already vulnerable
group could prove counterproductive, further damaging public trust and sending
those who should be screened and monitored deeper underground.
“We are paying attention to this
issue,” Ma Guoqiang, the Chinese Communist Party secretary of Wuhan, said at a
news conference there last Tuesday.
“I believe that some people may label
Hubei people or report them, but I also think most people will treat Hubei
people with a good heart.”
While networks of volunteers and
Christian groups have been vocal about offering help, many local leaders have
focused efforts on finding and isolating people from Hubei. On big screens and
billboards, propaganda videos and posters warn people to stay inside, wear
masks and wash hands.
In the northern province of Hebei, one
county offered bounties of 1,000 yuan, or about $140, for each Wuhan person
reported by residents. Images online showed towns digging up roads or
deputizing men to block outsiders. Some apartment-building residents barricaded
the doors of their towers with China’s ubiquitous ride-share bikes.
In the eastern province of
Jiangsu, quarantine turned to
imprisonment after authorities used metal poles to barricade
shut the door of a family recently returned from Wuhan. To get food, the family
relied on neighbors who lowered provisions with a rope down to their back
balcony, according to a local news report.
Scared
for the safety of his children as conditions at home worsened, Andy Li, a tech
worker from Wuhan traveling with his family in Beijing, rented a car and began
driving south to Guangdong, an effort to find refuge with relatives there. In
Nanjing, he was turned away from one hotel before getting a room at a luxury
hotel.
There he set up a self-imposed family
quarantine for four days, until local authorities ordered all people from Wuhan
to move to a hotel next to the city’s central rail station. Mr. Li said the
quarantine hotel did not seem to be doing a good job isolating people. Food
delivery workers came and went, while gaps in the doors and walls allowed
drafts in.
“They’re only working to separate Wuhan
people from Nanjing people,” Mr. Li said. “They don’t care at all if Wuhan
people infect each other.”
To help, he stuffed towels and tissues
under the door to block the drafts.
“I’m
not complaining about the government," Mr. Li said. “There will always be
loopholes in policy. But in a selfish way I’m just really worried about my
children.”
Across the country, the response from
local authorities often resembles the mass mobilizations of the Mao era rather
than the technocratic, data-driven wizardry depicted in propaganda about
China’s emerging surveillance state. They have also turned to techniques
Beijing used to fight the outbreak of SARS, another deadly disease, in 2002 and
2003, when China was much less technologically sophisticated.
Checkpoints to screen people for fevers
have popped up at tollbooths, at the front gates of apartment complexes and in
hotels, grocery stores and train stations. Often those wielding the thermometer
guns don’t hold them close enough to a person’s forehead, generating unusually
low temperature readings. Such checks were worthless, for instance, against one
man in the western province of Qinghai, whom police are investigating on
suspicion that he covered up his symptoms to travel.
Authorities
have used computerized systems that track ID cards — which must be used to take
most long-distance transport and stay in hotels — to round up people from
Wuhan. Yet one article about the ID system in The People’s Daily, the
mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party, included a plea to all passengers
on affected flights and trains to report themselves.
The campaigns have turned life upside
down in unexpected ways. Jia Yuting, a 21-year-old student in Wuhan, had
already been back in her hometown in central China for 18 days — longer than
the 14-day quarantine period — when she got news her grandfather was sick in a
nearby village. During a visit to see him, she followed local instructions
broadcast on speakers in the village and registered her personal details with
the local Communist Party Committee.
When
a middle-school teacher randomly reached out to her on the messaging app WeChat
to inquire about her health, she realized her data had been leaked online and
was spreading on a list. Later, she received a threatening phone call from a
man who lived in her home city.
“Why
did you come back Wuhan? You should have stayed there. You Wuhan dog!” she
recalled him saying.
Authorities offered her no explanation
for how it happened, and insisted such leaks did not disrupt her regular life.
Three days after her visit to the village, her grandfather died. Local
officials there immediately told her family that she would not be allowed to
return to the village to pay her final respects at a funeral that was taking
place more than three weeks after she had returned from Wuhan.
“I feel that the villagers are ignorant
and the government isn’t helping; instead it’s leaking the information
everywhere without telling them that I don’t have any symptoms,” she said,
adding that she felt guilty she could not be there to comfort her grandmother.
“I was very close to my grandfather. I
think it’s not humane — it’s cruel.”
Lin Qiqing contributed
research.
Paul Mozur is a Shanghai-based technology
reporter. He writes about Asia’s biggest tech companies, as well as
cybersecurity, emerging internet cultures, censorship and the intersection of
geopolitics and technology in Asia. He previously worked for The Wall Street
Journal. @paulmozur
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