Chinese human rights lawyer stopped by COVID-19 health app
Wang Yu is known for her humanitarian work. Her QR code turned red twice even though she had tested negative. In one case, she was supposed to offer her counsel in a human rights case. In the other, she was in Beijing two months before the Communist Party congress. Ostensibly designed to monitor the pandemic, health apps are being used for social control.
Beijing (AsiaNews) – Chinese authorities are using the colour-coded COVID-19 apps to limit the movement of human rights activists, this according to Wang Yu, a well-known lawyer who was jailed in the past for her humanitarian work.
Under Xi Jinping's zero-Covid policy, without a green health code, it is impossible to travel or enter public places.
Although many restrictions have been lifted following recent nationwide anti-lockdown protests, certain mobile applications continue to be used locally to control the spread of the coronavirus.
As the Associated Press noted, twice this year Wang found herself suddenly with the red QR code despite testing negative or having had no contacts with infected people.
The first time this happened was back in March when she travelled to Datong, an industrial coal-mining town in Shanxi, to offer counselling on a humanitarian case.
The second was in August, when she was in Beijing, two months before the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
Back at her parents' home in Inner Mongolia, the health code turned green in late November after the congress.
Wang was the first among a group of lawyers from the Beijing law firm Fengrui to be arrested on the night of 9-10 July 2015, part of a nationwide police operation that saw more than 300 lawyers and associates arrested, some of them Protestant and Catholic.
The operation came to be known as the “709 crackdown" since it started on July 9 of that year.
Many of those arrested were tried and convicted; several "confessed" their crime on video; several came out of prison physically and psychologically crushed after enduring torture.
Wang's case is not the first in which the authorities use mobile apps to enforce social control on people.
In June, the QR code was activated in Zhengzhou (Henan) to stifle protest by hundreds of depositors, victims of fraud at four banks.
In April, the banks in question had blocked their online services without warning, and customers were denied access to their accounts (with savings running in the billions of yuan).
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18/02/2020 10:04
