Ian Williams

A Chinese health app, developed to enforce the Communist party’s draconian Covid-19 restrictions, is being repurposed to tighten political control on dissidents and others deemed to be troublemakers. Only the very young and very old are exempt from the compulsory National Health Code System. The ‘traffic light app’, as it has been dubbed, assigns Chinese citizens a colour code: green, yellow or red to signify Covid infection risk. Those with green are free to move around; red can mean instant quarantine. The app requires users to submit information about their health status and other personal details, while at the same time harvesting online behavioural and location data.

The Beijing political rumour mill has gone into overdrive in recent weeks, seizing upon every nuance and reading between every line for signs of the impending downfall of ‘Xi dada’ (Big Daddy Xi). All kinds of stories are being circulated about President Xi Jinping's health, with reports over squabbling over his likely successor. Chinese premier Li Keqiang is being tipped. The predicted replacement of Xi by Li has its roots in differences on the economy and Covid-19, so the rumours go – and there does appear to be a split of sorts. In his public pronouncements Xi has doubled down on zero-Covid above all else. He has made little mention of China’s economic hardships, urging officials to stick with his Covid elimination strategy as a mark of loyalty.

Taipei Nowhere is watching the zero-Covid horror show unfolding in China more closely than Taiwan, where it is encouraging the island to ease restrictions, even as cases of the infectious Omicron variant spike. Taiwan’s premier Su Tseng-chang has said the extreme measures being imposed on the other side of the Taiwan Strait are ‘cruel’ and his country would not follow suit. From next week, mandatory quarantine for arrivals in Taiwan will be cut to seven days from the current ten, as the island moves gradually towards a policy of trying to live with the virus.

Confusion is infecting Shanghai. The authorities are dithering over a promised easing of severe lockdown rules in the face of record cases of Covid-19 and widespread anger over their cack-handed way they have handled the crisis. The city has become a test for China’s faltering zero-Covid strategy, with nervous Communist party leaders sending mixed signals – announcing a change in the rules, while insisting they will stick to what they now characterise as a ‘dynamic’ zero-Covid policy ‘without hesitation or wavering’. At the weekend, vice-mayor Zong Ming announced a reclassification of Shanghai’s districts according to the severity of the outbreak.

The read-outs from Friday’s two-hour call between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping were so different, that you have to wonder whether the two leaders were on the same line. The White House version had Biden bluntly warning China of the consequences of providing assistance to Russia, while Beijing’s take presented Xi as a peacemaker ‘The Ukraine crisis is something we don’t want to see,’ Xi reportedly said. ‘Conflict and confrontation are not in the interests of anyone.’ The American read-out focussed narrowly on Ukraine, China’s on the broader relationship between the two countries. Global Times, the usually strident Communist party tabloid, described it as a ‘constructive interaction’.

Joe Biden appears to be trying to force China’s hand over Ukraine. This follows days during which Beijing has tied itself in knots, offering to play a ‘positive role’ for peace, but refusing to criticise Russia – avoiding even calling the invasion an invasion, and echoing Moscow’s justifications. US Officials at the weekend briefed American news outlets that Russia has asked China to provide military equipment, and requested additional economic assistance to help cushion the impact of Western sanctions. The officials, keen to protect their intelligence sources, declined to say precisely what Russia was seeking, nor what China’s response had been.

The plight of desperate Chinese nationals in Ukraine has further battered Xi Jinping’s credibility, testing his continued refusal to condemn the barbarity of his ‘best friend’ Vladimir Putin. There have been unconfirmed reports that four Chinese students were among 13 killed when a Russian rocket hit a dormitory of Kharkiv’s Academy of Culture. Students took to social media to plead for help when none came from the Chinese embassy in Kyiv. ‘The embassy never comes, no plane comes. We can only save ourselves. They abandoned us,’ said one post on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform. A video post claimed students were being shot at indiscriminately by Russian soldiers.

A few hours after Vladimir Putin sent his tanks into Ukraine, Beijing announced that Russian wheat, previously barred because of fungal contamination, was now disease-free and large scale imports to China would begin. It was a first tangible sign of Xi Jinping’s willingness to cushion the blow of western sanctions on the Russian economy, and in effect underwrite Putin’s Ukrainian aggression. Russia is one of the world’s biggest wheat producers, and trade is highly vulnerable to western restrictions. China’s wheat lifeline followed the signing last month of a 30-year contract for Russia to supply natural gas to China’s north east and a commitment to far greater energy cooperation.

The star of the Beijing Winter Olympics wasn’t an athlete: it was Bing Dwen Dwen, the spacesuit-clad panda mascot. It was deployed to cover the harsher political edges of the games, and was romping around on the ice at the closing gala. Bing Dwen Dwen is only the latest example of China’s use of ‘panda diplomacy’, so successful over recent decades. The Chinese Communist party has long used them as envoys to potential partners. A bill now wending its way through the US Congress strikes at the heart of panda diplomacy. If it passes, it will keep American-born giant panda cubs in the US, which would break China’s monopoly on these vulnerable animals.

Never before have the participants in a major sporting event been so closely monitored as in this Winter Olympics in Beijing. The 1980 Summer Olympics in Soviet Moscow were nothing in comparison. Athletes are competing under a blanket of observation, ostensibly to keep Covid at bay, yet imposed by a paranoid Communist party for whom critical words or thoughts are as dangerous as any virus. Everyone attending the games, including athletes, support staff and media, must install on their phones an app, My 2022, which harvests a wide range of personal data. It has the ability to censor and track its users, according to cybersecurity experts who have examined the app. The app is used to submit health information such as Covid test results and vaccination status.

The growing alliance between Russia and China is something we shouldn’t lose sleep over, their long history of mutual suspicion runs too deep – or so we are told. Such a view is too complacent by half. China and Russia’s mutual hostility towards the West and their opportunism also run deep. And even if their burgeoning alliance is a marriage of convenience, it is still a very dangerous one. As Russia has massed more than 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border, the nightmare for western strategists is that Vladimir Putin’s actions are being coordinated with those of Xi Jinping in and around the Taiwan Strait, where China’s military intimidation of Taiwan has reached new levels of intensity.

In December last year Oxford University students were offered £15,000 in prize money if they could solve challenges relating to the surveillance and tracking of devices and their users. ‘Huawei welcomes a selection of top-of-the-class students to their 2021 University Challenge’, the invitations read. The company added that the technology would be used for ‘business intelligence’ and ‘security services’. The invitation to the ‘hackathon’, as Huawei described it, was aimed at data science students, and was relayed by Oxford’s careers service just a few weeks before Christmas.

With just three weeks until the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, Covid-19 is creeping ever closer to the capital. The Communist party is seeking to isolate Beijing from the rest of the country to keep the virus at bay and the games on track. But its zero-Covid policy, a desperate game of Whac-A-Mole with the virus, is looking increasingly unsustainable. All routes between Beijing and Tianjin have been closed after an outbreak in the port city, which is adjacent to the capital. Flights and high-speed train services in and out of a city of 14 million people have been cancelled and highways closed after the discovery of 126 cases in recent days, all of them the highly contagious Omicron variant. A third round of mass testing has been ordered.