[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
 |
|
A man who arrived from
Hubei Province in China crossing the Jiujiang Yangtze River Bridge near a checkpoint
in Jiujiang,
Jiangxi Province. Credit Thomas Peter/Reuters
|
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
