Containing COVID-19 Through ‘Surveillance Creep’ in China: Expansion of Digital and Physical Surveillance

Abstract

Situations of crises open opportunities to expand surveillance capabilities, a trend observed worldwide. China’s willingness to rapidly deploy big data surveillance and the ability to merge that with physical surveillance strategies has by far surpassed the responses of other countries in scope and speed. As part of the emergency pandemic response, the State Council announced that big data will be exhaustively used for epidemiological investigations. Strategies of physical surveillance, such as mobilisation of residential community volunteers or physical vaccination booklets, have been incorporated as part of the COVID-19 surveillance loop. In this chapter, we first map out key digital and physical strategies of COVID-19 surveillance. From there, we apply the concept of ‘surveillance creep’ to raise the question about the continuities and beneficiaries of COVID’s big data. By applying semi-grounded analysis to a set of government policies, company documents and news articles, we find that COVID’s big data has far exceeded its originally intended uses. Some of direct uses are tied to strengthening the knowledge of government agencies about the population while others are secondary and are related to the technical capabilities of processing big data. In China, the use of big data for the monitoring of COVID-19 and its aftermath have been embraced at a broad scale, both habituating people to a closed loop of surveillance and resulting in the spillover function creep of surveillance capabilities.