It’s similar to asking how much Western COVID policy is about COVID. Mask mandates are partly about COVID but they are also about everything else.
If China would lose the battle against COVID, that would suggest that the people in which a lot of political capital was invested were wrong. That would be bad for Xi Jinping.
I doubt that senior people in the CCP are focused on “We want to create a surveillance state, so how can we convince the population that they should be surveilled?”
Just like the extreme fear in TV production sets gets them to go to crazy lengths for anti-COVID policies, I think there’s a good reason for some bureaucrat to think “We don’t want our people to starve, so we better make damn sure that we can do contact tracing with 100% efficiency.”
If the person who created the wristband program gets promoted I doubt it’s for a justification like “they helped increase the surveillance of people” but rather that they are willing to go to extreme lengths to make sure that the zero COVID policy succeeds.
That said, of course, the systems also get used for other purposes, whether in China or in the West.
It’s similar to asking how much Western COVID policy is about COVID. Mask mandates are partly about COVID but they are also about everything else.
If China would lose the battle against COVID, that would suggest that the people in which a lot of political capital was invested were wrong. That would be bad for Xi Jinping.
I doubt that senior people in the CCP are focused on “We want to create a surveillance state, so how can we convince the population that they should be surveilled?”
Just like the extreme fear in TV production sets gets them to go to crazy lengths for anti-COVID policies, I think there’s a good reason for some bureaucrat to think “We don’t want our people to starve, so we better make damn sure that we can do contact tracing with 100% efficiency.”
If the person who created the wristband program gets promoted I doubt it’s for a justification like “they helped increase the surveillance of people” but rather that they are willing to go to extreme lengths to make sure that the zero COVID policy succeeds.
That said, of course, the systems also get used for other purposes, whether in China or in the West.