How China & the World is Fighting COVID-19 with Technology
And the special challenges of dealing with the first epidemic in the age of social media
Normally, this would be the time of the year when we write about the latest announcements and trends from Mobile World Congress, a major global conference for the mobile industry that takes place in Barcelona at the end of February.
This year, however, there won’t be much to report, for the conference, along with many, many other events across sectors, has been canceled last-minute, due to rising health concerns in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. In fact, CNBC reports that the outbreak has caused the cancellation or postponement of more than 24 exhibitions and conferences worldwide, resulting in damaging ripple effects across the hotel, airline, entertainment, restaurant, pharmaceuticals, and many other industries. The global manufacturing supply chain has also encountered major disruptions as Chinese factories shut down, forcing Apple to withdraw its quarterly revenue guidance and hurting the bottom line of many other global conglomerates.
By now, if you’re not living under a rock, you’re probably heard of the recent round of coronavirus epidemic, officially named “COVID-19” by the World Health Organization (WHO), that originated in Wuhan, China. The outbreak was first reported to the WHO on December 31, and by mid-January, it had begun spreading rapidly, leading to the WHO declaring it a “global health emergency” by January 30. So far, over 97% of the confirmed cases are located in mainland China, although the global spread is reportedly accelerating, with some health experts warning that the outbreak could grow into a full-blown global pandemic.
Although the original cause of the disease is still under investigation, China has wasted no time leveraging modern technologies, such as facial recognition, drones, mobile payments, and big data applications to track and contain the spread. While some implementations are more successful than others, there has been a clearly unified strategy of making good use of the surveillance infrastructure that is already in place.
It is fascinating to examine how China is leveraging its unique technology ecosystem in response to this ongoing public health crisis and how the public is using digital tools to explore alternative options when normal offline routines get disrupted. It offers an intriguing sneak peek into a future where technology will become our best defense against ecological disasters and resulting crises, and how social media may be a double-edged sword in solving them.
Quarantines Driving Everyone Online
What can you do when you’re stuck at home for more than 3 weeks? In response to the quasi-quarantines and lockdowns that many cities have implemented since the Chinese New Year, many residents, regardless of age and level of digital savviness, have predictably turned to digital channels for entertainment, remote working and learning, and online shopping.
Social media, news and fitness apps, along with video games have all seen a sharp increase in installs and engagement, according to an analysis by Goldman Sachs. On the video-streaming site Bilibili, views of fitness content jumped by almost 50%. Two of China’s most popular games, “Honor of Kings” and “Game for Peace,” both suffered from server overloads in the last few weeks. The increased amount of people being bored at home has also reportedly given a boost to iPad sales in China even as production capacity went down.
Many residents, regardless of age and level of digital savviness, have predictably turned to digital channels for entertainment, remote working and learning, and online shopping.
Online entertainment got a huge boost too, sometimes in rather unexpected ways. Due to mandated theater closures around the country, which has already cost China’s movie business over $1 billion in lost revenue, several blockbusters originally aimed for the Chinese New Year holiday window were released on streaming services instead, driving many people to sign up for subscriptions or watch for free with ads. Meanwhile, “cloud raves” have been popping up on Douyin (China’s version of TikTok), featuring real nightclub DJs spinning tunes via livestreams to millions of viewers and earning thousands of dollars in virtual tipping.
Unsurprisingly, ecommerce is also getting a big boost as more people turn to online shopping. Sales of fresh food on JD.com, which is partly-owned by Tencent, jumped 215% in sales volume during the 10-day period ending on February 2, Digiday reports. Taobao Live, Alibaba’s live streaming platform, saw a sharp rise of 110% in brand activity this past month as Chinese merchants slowly resumed their operations and looked for ways to reach consumers amid the coronavirus outbreak.
Restaurants and fast-food chains are also stepping up on “contactless” in-store pickup to prevent the spread via human-to-human contact. Mobile ordering has already seen significant adoption in China in recent years, thanks largely to the widespread usage of mobile payments, and this round of coronavirus fear is leading more people to adopt mobile ordering as an option. In addition, major delivery services are also fast-tracking their delivery robots for human-free services. Meituan put its autonomous delivery vehicles on public roads for the first time last week, while JD.com and Ele.me are sending their robots to quarantine areas. Crises like this highlight one often-underlooked advantage of robotics — they are immune to viruses and other bio-chemistry hazards that are dangerous to humans.
Remote working and learning tools also received a nice boost in China as a result of school and office closures. Office workers are forced to stay at home and adopt a range of homegrown productivity software platforms, such as Alibaba’s Dingtalk, Tecent’s WeChat Work, and Bytedance’s Lark (think Microsoft Teams or Slack, but with Zoom built in), for the first time. Since schools in most cities are closed indefinitely because of the virus, over 200 million kids across China started their spring semester via online classes. The aforementioned Dingtalk launched online classes for students to tune in for live broadcasts of lessons, and China’s Ministry of Education debuted a “national Internet cloud classroom” designed to cater to 50 million elementary and middle school students at the same time. It remains to be seen whether this wave of adoption of remote productivity tools will stick once the outbreak is over.
Interestingly, the boost for digital businesses is not a phenomenon limited to China only — as the coronavirus spreads in clusters around Japan, the “stay-at-home” economy is getting a boost, pushing stocks of companies catering to remote working, food delivery, and ecommerce to record highs. With coronavirus unfortunately spreading globally, it will be comforting to know at least the online businesses are getting a boost from people being bored at home.
Embracing online tools is a logical response to quarantines and city lockdowns, and it helps to connect people stuck at home, keeping them entertained and occupied. However, increased usage of social media and algorithm-driven news apps like Bytedance’s Toutiao has led to some unintended consequences in dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak.
Epidemic in the Age of Social Media
Like other countries, China’s social media is not immune to misinformation and fake news. Unlike most other countries, however, it is also heavily censored and monitored by the government. This dichotomy has created an interesting dynamic between Chinese internet users and media outlets, as people oscillate between official media reports and the grassroots reports they see on social channels, trying to gauge the truth.
Like a grand social experiment on what happens when over one billion people are forced to stay at home and socialize online, the ongoing epidemic is notable for being the first large-scale outbreak in the age of social media, with all of its perks and downsides. The lockdown has given rise to countless memes and funny hashtag challenges, but as the number of coronavirus deaths jumped, so did brewing discontent. Social media users quickly took to Weibo and WeChat to express their grief and outrage over the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, a whistleblower doctor who was silenced by authorities after warning the public of a potential outbreak via WeChat. The hashtag #WeWantFreedomOfSpeech amassed nearly 2 million views on Weibo, China’s Twitter, before it was deleted.
The outbreak is also pouring gasoline on the misinformation issue, as dubious health advice, and baseless conspiracy theories about the coronavirus spread like wildfire across Chinese social media, including a particularly contrived one that falsely asserts that Bill Gates is somehow connected with the virus outbreak through his nonprofit organization’s funding of the Pirbright Institute.
Of course, misinformation about the coronavirus outbreak is not isolated to China. The most popular YouTube videos about the coronavirus are being made in India, many of which contain a mixture of hoaxes and half-truths to sensationalize the situation and make them difficult to fact-check. A post shared 16,000 times on Facebook falsely advises people in the Philippines to “keep your throat moist”, avoid spicy food and “load up on vitamin C” in order to prevent the disease. According to the Washington Post, thousands of Russian-linked accounts on social media have been posting near-identical messages containing false narratives about the coronavirus spread.
In response, Tencent, TikTok, Google, and Facebook are all making ongoing efforts to address this issue and tamper down the spread of harmful information, but so far, social media algorithms, designed to maximize engagement and thus tend to promote sensationalizing content, is still spreading false information. Misinformation has always existed on social media, but it is spreading like never before during this outbreak when over one billion people are checking and sharing on social media all day like their lives depend on it. When culture is driven by online discourse, the flaws of algorithms become all the more evident.
Misinformation has always existed on social media, but it is spreading like never before during this outbreak when over one billion people are checking and sharing on social media all day like their lives depend on it.
Chinese internet users, however, are familiar enough with the government-sanctioned censorship to know that not everything they see in state-run media outlets, which are known to sugarcoat thorny social issues in the name of maintaining “social harmony,” or the kind of grassroots journalism circulating on social media and other online channels, which is prone to clickbaity exaggeration and distortion of truth. Most Chinese consumers today are media-savvy enough to understand that neither is to be trusted completely, and that the truth exists somewhere in the middle, between the official accounts and the social media heresy.
Interestingly, this heightened mistrust towards both media camps is a severe cause for anxiety over the public health emergency, which partly contributed to the support of using surveillance infrastructure to fight the epidemic.
Fighting Epidemic with Surveillance Tech
China gets plenty of flack for its Orwellian surveillance technology on the global stage. In the days of an epidemic outbreak, however, surveillance tech, ranging from CCTV cameras boasting facial recognition and thermal tracking to backdoor access on popular social and payment apps, suddenly doesn’t look too bad in the court of public opinion, as long as they can help contain the outbreak and save lives. Although it is too early to tell how successful these efforts have been in curbing the outbreak and mitigating the damage, the shadowy presence of surveillance tech is suddenly pushed into the spotlight.
Facial recognition is already widely in use in public spaces in China, so it is only natural that they are being leveraged to track travelers and pedestrians in hope of identifying suspected virus carriers. Chinese firms Megvii and Baidu, two leaders in facial recognition tech, announced that they had deployed a fever detection system in major Beijing railway stations, which can detect abnormal body temperatures and alert authorities. Ironically, there have been reports on how facial recognition systems failed to identify potential virus carriers and help contain the spread due to most people wearing face masks and obstructing their faces. But before you can laugh at the irony, some Chinese AI startups, such as SenseTime and Hanwang, are now claiming that they have cracked the code for facial recognition that can identify people even with face masks on.
Meanwhile, drones are taking to the sky to conduct aerial surveillance and more. For example, a Twitter video posted by Global Times, a state-backed publication, shows a drone with a camera telling people to wear masks. In Wuhan, drones have been deployed to hover over the construction sites for two emergency hospitals being built and provide lighting for the night shifts.
Mobile location data is also part of the game, privacy concerns be damned. China Unicom and China Telecom, both state-owned telecom companies, have been asking users to put in the last few digits of their ID or passport number to verify their identity, which will then be used to track their whereabouts to ensure they don’t come into contact with the virus. In Mexico, Uber has been alerting some of its users to a possible coronavirus exposure and temporarily suspended hundreds of accounts due to potential contact with confirmed patients. The power of big data is on full display when it comes to tracking and curbing the spread of the virus.
WeChat and Alipay, two of the most used apps in China, both have been involved in the top-down measures in tracking the virus outbreak. The officials working for the government of Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, reportedly tracked both offline and online purchases of fever medicine to organize relief efforts, presumably via payment history logged by Alipay and WeChat Pay. During recent weeks, as people slowly begin to return to work, the Chinese government instructed Alibaba to develop a color-coded system to classify people based on their self-reported health conditions and travel history based on mobile location data. People who have traveled past any area with a cluster of confirmed cases will soon see their green travel pass downgraded to a yellow one.
At the end of the day, however, the most powerful surveillance network is still the peer-to-peer one. Despite having the vast surveillance apparatus at their disposal, authorities are asking neighbors to inform on one another and alert them about suspected virus carriers, sometimes for a cash reward. The city of Shijiazhuang, for example, offered local citizens up to RMB2,000, or $290, for reporting anyone who has recently travelled to Wuhan but has yet to register with the local authorities. It is somewhat comforting to know even China, a country with reportedly widespread implementation of sophisticated facial recognition systems, still needs to rely on human surveillance. But the current inadequacy likely means that China would double down on its surveillance network and deeply integrate it in the city infrastructure as the country builds out the smart cities of tomorrow.
Innovations tend to advance by leaps and bounds during wartime, and Chinese tech firms have certainly played a prominent role in the battle against coronavirus so far. Putting the ethical debate on surveillance tech aside, it is obvious that technology has played an overall positive role in helping China and the world to deal with this outbreak. In the future, as we face an increasing amount of potential ecological disasters and resulting public health crises, technology, especially the so-called “resilience tech,” will no doubt have to advance and evolve in tandem to help us deal with the new challenges that arise.
