Week 8-10: a sketch of the final project

Hi all!

In the past three weeks, I followed Juli’s advice to try to contact people for a pilot interview. It was really difficult to discuss COVID without rapport or trust with people living in mainland China because of the tightened censorship. Fortunately, I found few student friends and a journalist, but I still haven’t talked with workers and the middle class. I’d like to share few points I found interesting. (I will put them at the end of the blog if someone is interested.)

Background:

China announced 20 new guidelines to loosen the pandemic control, such as shortening the time of quarantine, limiting the range of risky areas, and preventing longterm lockdown. However, the guidances didn’t make improvement; instead, the control in many places even became tightened. A more prevalent situation is that a building or a neighbourhood will be lockdown once a COVID case is discovered. A whole county or small city will stay static and silent if the virus expands. So, citizens in high risk areas cannot leave their home. The infected people and their close-contacts are centrally managed in temporary hospitals. People in low risk areas need to have at least one COVID test every 48/72 hours to enter public venues.

Idea:

In my views, the new guidances don’t change the structural problems: a digital labelling method is used to categorise and restrain citizens; the labelling logic is expanded to designate risky areas that affects groups of people. They are made reasonable in a strong policy and a grand political narrative. And this data-driven control is constantly eroding civil rights in the name of protecting the right to life and intensifies the preexisting social contradictions. In the E&I essay, I have already attempted to connect the health code in China and the concept of digital epidermalization to analyse a data-driven inequality, misuse of digital infrastructures and restrictions on social mobility (though further suitability should be carefully considered). And, what I’m thinking about currently is to expand the essay topic rather than only focus on the health code mechanism. And I will try to stick to the direction of topic related to data-driven inequality.

Possible research questions:

Actually, I cannot decide my rigorous research questions because I don’t have enough materials to support my thinking, and a series of events are still ongoing. But I’m trying to list few possible questions that I expect to find answers and form a cohesive logic.

How does the health code label and categorise citizens to facilitate a standardised COVID governance? And how this logic connects with to the division of risk areas that indicates lockdown?
How the pandemic control power is de-centralized and flowed to local administrations?
(as every province and even several cities has own version of health code; every community is relatively independent to decide whether to lockdown)
How a new pandemic citizenship is constructed in the discourse of “war to COVID” during the continuous Zero-Covid policy? And why citizens are questioning and resisting it recently?

Method:

I will continue to use interviews and discourse analysis to collect qualitative data. Besides, I’m also thinking about some new forms, but currently I don’t have any feasible ideas.

———————————

Interview summary:

I talked with several residents in Shijiangzhuang, the first city to respond the new guidances (though giving up a week later). Even though a city canceled the many covid restrictions, my interviewees were unwilling to go on street. They had two concerns: fear of entering temporary hospitals because there would be more possibility to contact covid; fear of the virus itself because the symptom and its after effect is uncertain to them (and I think there is sort of effect from severeness of the virus in the propaganda). And I think the things happening later prove these fears are the concern of the most people because many communities required to recover the free and daily covid test that had been previously cancelled.

The live streaming of the World Cup is a contrast for citizens who are lockdown at home to rethink the domestic covid control. (The official response is to cut the close-up shots of the audience in the live streaming.)

Reading list:

-Related papers:

Zhang. (2022). Decoding China’s COVID-19 Health Code Apps: The Legal Challenges. Healthcare (Basel), 10(8), 1479. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare10081479

Sun, & Wang, W. Y. (2022). Governing with health code: Standardising China’s data network systems during COVID‐19. Policy and Internet, 14(3), 673–689. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.292

Tan, Chiu-Shee, C., & Duarte, F. (2022). From SARS to COVID-19: Digital infrastructures of surveillance and segregation in exceptional times. Cities, 120, 103486–103486. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2021.103486

Fan Yang, Luke Heemsbergen, & Robbie Fordyce. (2021). Comparative analysis of China’s Health Code, Australia’s COVIDSafe and New Zealand’s COVID Tracer Surveillance Apps: A new corona of public health governmentality? Media International Australia Incorporating Culture & Policy, 178(1), 182–197. https://doi.org/10.3316/informit.771721788761660

-General readings:

Foucault, & Senellart, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics : lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79 / Michel Foucault ; edited by Michel Senellart ; translated by Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan.

Petrakaki, Hilberg, E., & Waring, J. (2021). The Cultivation of Digital Health Citizenship. Social Science & Medicine (1982), 270, 113675–113675. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113675

Wang, & Tucker, J. V. (2021). “I am not a number”: Conceptualising identity in digital surveillance. Technology in Society, 67, 101772–. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2021.101772