Abstract
This article critically examines South Korea and China’s COVID-19 tracking apps by bridging surveillance studies with feminist technoscience’s understanding of the “politics of care”. Conducting critical readings of the apps and textual analysis of discursive materials, we demonstrate how the ideological, relational, and material practices of the apps strategically deployed “care” to normalize a particular form of pandemic technogovernance in these two countries. In the ideological dimension, media and state discourse utilized a combination of vilifying and nationalist rhetoric that framed one’s acquiescence to surveillance as a demonstration of national belonging. Meanwhile, the apps also performed ambivalent roles in facilitating essential care services and mobilizing self-tracking activities, which contributed to the manufacturing of pseudonormality in these societies. In the end, we argue that the Chinese and South Korean governments managed to frame their aggressive surveillance infrastructure during COVID-19 as a form of paternalistic care by finessing the blurred boundaries between care and control.
Introduction
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries across the world developed various digital tools for disease surveillance and management purposes. Some of the earliest efforts were materialized in China and South Korea. In February 2020, China’s local governments partnered with technology giants Tencent and ANT Financial and introduced the “Health Code”—a QR code software that classifies people into color codes and dictates whether they should be quarantined or not. Meanwhile, South Korea’s Ministry of Interior and Safety (MoIS) developed the “Self-Quarantine Safety Protection App”—a mobile application that assists the state officials’ monitoring and management of people under home isolation. Besides collecting daily symptoms reporting, this app tracks users’ real-time locations to ensure their home presence.
Following China and South Korea, such initiatives to mitigate the pandemic via technocratic means became a worldwide phenomenon during COVID-19 (O’Neill et al., 2020). These surveillance projects, while being propagated as efficient and necessary for public health purposes, simultaneously raised grave concerns regarding privacy infringement and violation of civil liberties. Particularly, international media showed mixed responses on China and South Korea’s COVID-19 apps. While recognizing their alleged abilities in slowing down the local spread, they cautioned these apps’ possible misuse and largely described them as a “Big Brother” type of digital social control that endows the state with exceptional authority (Holmes, 2020; Mozur et al., 2020).
However, there is relatively little research on how these technologies were actually communicated and shaped on the local grounds. We acknowledged some discrepancy between (Western) outsiders’ generally dystopian understanding of these surveillance technologies deployed in East Asian contexts and the visible, celebratory discourse within China and South Korea that supported the state’s disciplinary actions, at least during the initial months of the pandemic. Such a shared phenomenon between these two countries, despite their different political regimes and sociocultural contexts, served as a rationale to juxtapose these two cases.
The goal of this article is to generate a more nuanced and empirically rigorous picture of these apps’ social shaping and explain how they became normalized as central and legitimate tools for state governance. To examine the dynamics of power that circulate China and Korea’s COVID-19 apps, we apply feminist science and technology studies’ (STS) notion of the “politics of care” as an analytical framework, when studying these surveillance technologies’ refiguring of state–society relations. Understanding technoscience as deeply biopolitical projects and central sites of ideological production, feminist STS scholars have offered theoretical and methodological tools to interrogate the discourses and practices of technoscience (Pollock and Subramaniam, 2016; Weber, 2006). Questioning for whom and how technologies and scientific knowledge have been produced and deployed, their research reveals how myriad forms of injustices, such as racism, sexism, colonialism, and militarism, are embedded in technoscientific inquiry. Feminist understanding of the “politics of care,” in particular, conceptualizes care as always embroiled in complex, fraught, and non-innocent politics, serving as a useful framework to critically study both the hegemonic structures within care and the practical and affective “doings” that care work performs. We have put together the fields of surveillance studies and politics of care to better understand these technologies’ manufacturing of creepy yet attentive, controlling yet caring, and repressive yet protective relations.
Conducting a critical reading of the apps and textual analysis of primary and secondary materials, our examination reveals that both China and South Korea have deliberately engineered the feelings and concepts of care to normalize a particular form of pandemic technogovernance, which reconstructed the public imagination toward state surveillance as a form of paternalistic care. These COVID-19 surveillance technologies were communicated as essential tools, by not only the state actors but also users, that provide a sense of reassurance and attentiveness. Examining why users have actively constituted themselves as subjects of surveillance, we identify discursive, relational, and material practices contributing to this phenomenon. First, discourse around the apps constructed the moral infrastructures that legitimized their deployment, by (1) targeting those who are “deviant” to this system as objects of blame, establishing what we call as “structures of vilification,” and (2) propagating the apps as nationalist projects that protect citizens’ health and restore social order. As a result, state governance was described as an act of caring from above, invoking national pride over the state’s global competency in the COVID-19 response. Meanwhile, vis-à-vis such ideological forces, we identify the apps’ ambivalent roles in facilitating essential care services and mobilizing self-tracking activities, which helped users dispel their anxieties about potential infection through “corporeal attunement” (Amrute, 2019)—an affective rearrangement of the relationship between body, citizenship, and national belonging. Our study uncovers that the functioning of these surveillance infrastructures also required tedious and invisibilized labor from users and community workers, such as daily maintenance and repair of the app. These accounts reflect the messiness of these systems contrary to the state’s promise of their seamless operation.
Through this demystification process, we demonstrate how China and South Korea’s COVID-19 apps deliberately shaped themselves both as disciplinary machines that policed normative behaviors, and as makeshift care infrastructures that can provide a sense of reassurance and attentiveness to distressed citizens in uncertain times. Examining the ways such ideological and material practices of the apps interact and co-construct pandemic technogovernance, we argue that China and South Korea were able to normalize the deployment of surveillance technologies by finessing the blurred boundaries between care and control.
Situating COVID-19 surveillance technologies in China and South Korea
The proliferation of digital technologies implemented for COVID-19 response has catalyzed both new and old controversies regarding surveillance and public health. Particularly, the emergence of “contact tracing apps” has raised concerns around privacy violations, curtailment of civil liberties, and racial and sexual discrimination that these technologies may cause. Kitchin (2020) cautions that these apps promote disciplinary and controlling forms of governance that may pose severe threats to civil liberties, rendering people more exposed and made vulnerable to algorithmic surveillance. Moreover, given that most of these apps were developed in collaboration with industry actors, scholars have questioned their market-making objectives through the mechanism of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), in which data extracted from contact tracing apps are commercially repurposed (Kitchin, 2020; Taylor et al., 2020). Meanwhile, others focused on the discriminatory and exclusive nature of contact tracing apps, arguing that their classification and quantification of human bodies do not account for various categories of difference (Milan, 2020) and that the tolls of surveillance disproportionately fall upon people of color (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020) and those at the border (Molnar, 2020).
While we agree with these concerns wholeheartedly, we stress the need to situate COVID-19 surveillance technologies within the sociocultural contexts of where they emerge from, to avoid universalizing different histories and evolutions of these digital tools. In other words, this article partly aims to “de-exoticize the natives” in privacy studies (Arora, 2019), who, in this case, are Chinese and Korean user-subjects whose compliance to the surveillance apps were largely explained as due to their “collectivist culture” or general lack of sensitivity in data protection, when observed from the Western-focused conceptualization of privacy. To complicate these interpretations, we first contextualize China and Korea’s COVID-19 apps within these countries’ respective histories of digitization and long-term cultivation of techno-nationalist values that have linked a nation’s success to its technological strength.
We contend that China and South Korea’s COVID-19 apps should be considered as a continuum of both countries’ long-standing efforts to mitigate uncertainties and risks with digital technologies, which have been a staple part of Asian countries’ modernization projects in the late 20th century. First, China has been aggressively centralizing digital and big data capacities in the postsocialist era to effectively govern its people. Collaborating with technology conglomerates such as Alibaba and Tencent in data sharing, the Chinese state has been extending the scope of its surveillance power via platformization in the past decade (de Kloet et al., 2019). For instance, China’s Social Credit System, a public–private reputation system developed by the Chinese government and the tech industry, incorporates citizens’ administrative, economic, and behavioral data to implement punishment and reward mechanisms (Liang et al., 2018). The Health Code has been built upon these existing information and platform infrastructures (see also Yuan, 2021). In February 2020, after weeks of lockdown in Wuhan, Alipay and WeChat developed the Health Code into their existing apps and launched it in Hangzhou and Shenzhen, cities where the two companies are, respectively, headquartered. Under the goal of safely reopening the Chinese society, the Health Code became adopted in more than 300 cities by the end of May 2020.
The main function of the Health Code is to classify people’s contagion risks and enforce quarantine using multiple data collected from (1) daily symptoms reporting and travel histories submitted by app users and (2) mobile phone data, including geolocation data and financial transaction histories. Analyzing this data, the app designates a color-based QR code for each user: a green code means that the user has been exposed to little or no risk and can move around freely, whereas yellow and red codes indicate medium to high risk and that the user needs to self-isolate for 7–14 days. People have to present their color codes to the local authorities or community workers whenever they access public transportations, buildings, and other facilities.
Meanwhile, the historical lineage of South Korea’s COVID-19 app dates back to 2015, when Korea experienced the outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). Heavily criticized for poor epidemiological surveys, including contact tracing and quarantine efforts, the South Korean government since then authorized the use of mobile phone location tracking for public health purposes. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the MERS epidemic, state authorities constructed the “Smart Quarantine System,” a public–private health surveillance infrastructure that integrates mobility- and health-related data to quickly identify suspected carriers of the virus (Kim, 2021). South Korea’s swift development and implementation of the “Self-quarantine Safety Protection App” in the early months of the COVID-19 was dependent on such already institutionalized measures (see also Yuan, 2021).
In South Korea, two groups were strictly subjected to mandatory 14-day home isolation since the outbreak of COVID-19: (1) recent travelers from abroad and (2) close contacts of confirmed patients. Launched on March 6, 2020, the app was developed to enforce quarantine orders on these people, performing mainly two roles. First, a user has to report their health status on the app twice a day by answering yes or no on four categories: temperature, soreness, fever, and cough. The app matches the user with a designated civil servant working at the local public health clinic who would be responsible for monitoring and communicating with the user throughout the quarantine period. The second function of the app is location tracking—when the user first installs the app, they need to register the place where they will self-quarantine for the next 2 weeks. Tracking the phone’s location at all times, the app immediately sends an alarm to both the user and the designated civil servant if the user leaves the quarantine area.
Positioning China and South Korea’s COVID-19 apps within their respective sociohistorical contexts highlight that their emergence is far from new—these systems are largely built upon existing public–private risk management infrastructures that have established not only the technical and institutional but also the perceptual groundwork for the deployment of these COVID-19 apps. Prior experiences with the aforementioned state-initiated surveillance technologies heavily guided the social shaping of these apps, affecting the ways various actors register symbolic and affective meanings to their rollout.
Rethinking surveillance through the politics of care
In Asian Biotech, Ong (2010) demonstrates that the traumas of colonialism and anxieties over recent epidemics in Asia, such as SARS and Avian influenza, have produced a collective imaginary that renders biotechnology into nation-building opportunities. Especially in East Asia, explains Ong, the states emphasize cultural paternalism and sovereign custody of the population for biosecurity purposes. Invoking the notion of the state as a father-protector of their citizens, the states’ technogovernance during biosecurity events is often viewed as “a form of collective caring from above” (Ong, 2010: 17).
A similar notion of paternalistic care also appears in seminal works in surveillance studies. Cautioning that contemporary surveillance theory is dominated by dystopic models and metaphors driven from the discourse of Big Brother and the panopticon, Lyon (2013) turns attention to surveillance’s double-sided, paradoxical affordances. He contends that surveillance represents both a means of social control and a means of ensuring that citizens’ rights are respected and that such themes of care and control should be examined by attending to the context-specificity of surveillance. This article contributes to such a notion of care in surveillance studies by drawing from feminist STS perspectives on the politics of care that take both ideological and practice-based approaches to this concept (Buch, 2015; Hobart and Kneese, 2020). Rather than celebrating care as an escape from coercion and domination, this article attends to its messy politics and examines how ideologies and practices of care have participated in the construction of pandemic technogovernance in China and South Korea. Adopting the politics of care for studying these countries’ tech-based pandemic response, we explore how care has been manipulated in state projects as affordance and a phenomenon of surveillance.
To do so, we first focus on the critical reflections on care that aim to trouble the innocent and even romanticized treatment of this concept. While acknowledging care’s deeper feminist roots that fought to revalorize women’s labor, or “care work,” scholars in feminist technoscience have cautioned the too-often trend that views care, and positive affect attached to care, as an emancipatory force that allows alternative knowledge-making to take place (Murphy, 2015). They stress it is crucial to examine how such feelings of happiness, sympathy, and other forms of attachment, which are often conflated with care, are also deeply ingrained within the hegemonic structures of our worlds (Martin et al., 2015; Murphy, 2015; Viseu, 2015). These authors’ call to attend to the “politics of care” thus seeks to demonstrate how “care is strategically deployed as a means for technoscientific governance” (Martin et al., 2015: 632), by orchestrating the ways people feel, attach, and relate, for disciplinary purposes.
Several studies on healthcare, social welfare, and humanitarian aid, in particular, have grappled with the entangled, contested relationship between care and control in surveillance activities. Sandvik (2020), while studying wearable digital devices that monitor infants’ immunization records in India, demonstrates how dataveillance strategies for humanitarian aid render infants’ bodies into objects of intervention. In a different light, Moran-Thomas (2019) illustrates that some diabetic patient groups in fact demand to be surveilled and made “seen” by the state to receive institutional support and resources. This point echoes Hobart and Kneese’s (2020) emphasis that the question of care is inseparable from the existing structures of inequality and marginalization when determining who deserves care and who is not. Seiler (2020) for instance examines how social welfare programs in the United States are designed within the logic of white care—“a surround of institutions and infrastructure dedicated to [. . .] the comfort of the white citizenry” (p. 18)—that systematically subjects marginalized populations to institutional neglect.
However, while care indeed exists as an instrumentalized logic, orchestrated affect, and scarce resource, care is also an intersubjective, practical action (Buch, 2015). As seen from Tronto’s (1993) definition of care, “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world” (p. 103, emphasis by author), attention to the practices and materialities of care, including the practical tinkering and instruments involved in care work, have attracted scholarly attention (Mol et al., 2010). These studies demonstrate how intimate daily interactions, labors, conditions, and objects of care work are deeply moral and political as well—tracing the tensions and negotiations made in these sites, they interrogate “various forms of attunement and intersubjectivity crafted through care practices” (Buch, 2015: 282). Drawing from this perspective, we pay attention to the practical care works performed and facilitated by the COVID-19 apps, examining how they create new daily rhythms, routines, and socialities that produce a feeling of pseudo-normality. At the same time, following Mattern’s (2018) attention to the invisibilized and exploited labor of maintenance and caretaking, we investigate the micro-labors performed by various actors to maintain the apps, questioning who is made responsible to take care of these systems.
Putting together such diverse literature on care in feminist STS, we particularly inherit Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) conceptualization of care that defines it with three subdimensions: “concrete work of maintenance with ethical and affective implications, and as a vital politics in interdependent worlds” (p. 5). Applying these three subdimensions of care—labor/work, affect/affection, and ethics/politics—in our investigation of China and South Korea’s COVID-19 apps, we examine their ideological production of care but also pay attention to the everyday labors, conditions, tools, and affective relationships that are involved in their operation. In sum, this article addresses the following research questions: (1) What languages and affects are communicated in the apps’ vision, design, and implementation? (2) What kinds of labor do the apps perform and depend on? (3) What subjects, socialities, and citizenship do the interactions via the apps produce?
Research design
We addressed these questions by first conducting a critical reading of the apps, and second, identifying cultural discourse from the primary and secondary materials produced about them. This methodology was informed by Light et al.’s (2018) “walkthrough method,” which combines STS approaches to studying technological systems with cultural studies’ methods on recognizing symbolic representations to the analysis of software applications. To understand COVID-19 apps and their functions, two authors of this article each downloaded the Chinese and Korean apps and navigated their interfaces—this process involved close readings of the apps’ instructional pages, taking screenshots, and making notes about the app’s design, interface, and functionalities.
Then, we created an archive of primary and secondary materials published by the governmental departments, state and private news outlets, and user reviews, between February 1 and May 1, 2020. This timespan was selected as the Chinese and Korean governments started to discuss the app’s development in February and widely distributed them in March. Acknowledging that public perception toward these technologies is constantly changing, we clarify that our analysis is based on the initial stages of their deployment. First, to collect materials from government sources, we searched the “self-quarantine safety protection app” on the South Korean government’s official website (www.gov.kr) and the “Health Code” on the Chinese website (www.gov.cn). Collecting all policy papers, press releases, newsletters, and statements related to the respective countries’ COVID-19 apps, we obtained 61 documents in Korean and 44 documents in Chinese. We also collected articles from state news media, which included 12 articles from Korea TV (KTV), and 96 articles from four state-owned Chinese news outlets (People’s Daily, Xinhua News, China Daily, and Guangming Daily). Second, we collected 142 news articles published by the five biggest private news outlets in South Korea (Chosun, JoongAng, Kyunghyang, Dong-a, and Hankyoreh) and 71 published by three private Chinese news outlets (The Paper, Jiemian, and Caixin). Third, to aggregate user reviews, we searched the same keyword on Naver Blog (Korea’s biggest blogging platform) and Sina Weibo (China’s biggest microblogging platform). We retrieved all Korean blog posts published within the time range, which resulted in 518 original posts removing all duplicates; in terms of Weibo, we retrieved 13 trending hashtags with the keyword “Health Code” and collected the top 100 posts from each hashtag. Such difference in data collection was due to the dissimilar nature of these platforms, as Weibo posts are typically 100–200 characters long while Naver blog does not have character limits. Table 1 summarizes the list of collected materials by source. Although the collected user reviews were all publicly available, we paraphrased direct quotations to make original contents unsearchable (See Townsend and Wallace, 2016).
The number of data collected by source.
To identify the overarching cultural discourse from this corpus, we created a coding scheme based on three dimensions of care: labor/work, affect/affection, and ethics/politics. Specific codes under each dimension were decided using a grounded theory approach as researchers processed multiple rounds of reading and discussing themes that repeatedly emerge across Korean and Chinese materials. Once we agreed on the detailed coding scheme, one author who is native to Korean and the other who is native to Chinese conducted close readings of the materials and coded them, respectively. The next step moved toward refining these coded materials into a thematic structure informed by a qualitative thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2012), which involved extensive discussions among authors until they arrived at a coherent set of dominant topics and nuanced themes. Before we turn to the findings, we note that despite China and South Korea’s divergent governmental regimes—one authoritarian and the other democratic—and different experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, we identified overwhelming similarities rather than differences in the ways their apps were socially conceived.
Legitimizing surveillance: constructing the moral infrastructures of the COVID-19 apps
This section examines how the concepts and affects of care are inscribed into the communication of the apps, focusing on the moralizing work that state and news media have done for their distribution. We argue that these discursive practices constituted the essential moral infrastructures that facilitated the normalization of these surveillance tools.
Structures of vilification: classifying ideal and deviant subjects
In both China and South Korea, we discovered that materials from state and news media constantly defined and discriminated between “ideal” and “deviant” subjects of the apps. We argue that such defining work served as a vital mechanism that justified the needs of the apps by targeting these “deviant” individuals as objects of blame. In other words, normalizing the COVID-19 apps as necessary care structures in pandemic times was dependent on establishing, what we call, the structures of vilification.
The materials produced by governmental agencies conceptualized and distributed the notion of “ideal” user-subject by emphasizing the role of individual users in protecting the country by faithfully following the app. For instance, in China, “honest compliance” in daily self-tracking was described as fulfilling social responsibility and being in solidarity with others in this “people’s war” against the COVID-19 (Xinhua News, 2020). The state media urged that “the Health Code works efficiently only when citizens self-discipline and monitor each other to create a trusting society” (Xie, 2020). Similarly, press releases and flyers released by the Korean government emphasized how much influence an individual’s participation in surveillance can have in protecting the nation’s health: “you can protect the health and safety of your neighbors through strict self-isolation and following the safety rules of the app” (Ministry of Interior and Safety (MoIS), 2020). Propagating what is deemed as good citizens and rightful behaviors, the state discourse presented compliance with surveillance as a demonstration of one’s loyalty to the community.
The “deviant subject” category was also constantly conceptualized and renewed as users learned new ways to deceive or sidestep the apps. State discourse almost always included a description of legal, criminal charges one may face when one does not follow the quarantine rule, which includes using the apps. For instance, in Hangzhou, China, users who wrongly reported their health conditions were warned to be blacklisted by the Social Credit System—the state media published the names and the last four digits of personal ID numbers of those whose “misbehaviors” have been recorded to the local social credit system (He, 2020). Private news outlets and user reviews also described hiding or reporting false information to the app as selfish behaviors, and that such offenders “need to pay the price” (Xie, 2020). Meanwhile, in South Korea, private news media were major contributors that conducted such policing work. In March and April 2020, Korean news was flooded with articles that detected and vilified self-isolation violators who went outside of their homes while being subjected to quarantine. Particularly, those who left their phones at home to evade app tracking were publicly shamed: under the headline “self-isolation violators make fun of the quarantine system,” an article from Chosun wrote, “like outlaws, the family repeatedly escaped their home without carrying their phones to avoid location tracking” (Bae, 2020). Although these reports were often accompanied by comments that criticize the system’s imperfections, these comments were brought up to stress the need for tighter, inescapable enforcement. Rendering the image of the mass as “untrustworthy” and “careless,” Korean news media’s public blaming and punishment of these “deviant subjects” served as justifications for more extensive control. Responding to such reporting, the MoIS shortly announced a system update that allowed the app to sense human motion, which sets off an alarm when the app is left inactive for more than two hours.
In consequence of such collective distrust toward those under the quarantine order, which is a product of the structures of vilification that are inherently built within these surveillance infrastructures, the majority of Korean user reviews said they felt assured and cared for via the state’s enforced surveillance. Such blurred boundaries between care and control, or feeling care through control, is shown in the following quotes: “Walking out of Incheon airport, I was closely surveilled (or protected?) until I got home. I felt abandoned in the U.S., but here, everyone is watching me closely. This means that the system is managing high-risk people, rather than setting them loose in the public. Go Big Clinic!”
Here, the user tried to grapple with the increasingly entangled understanding of care and control, reflected in mentioning the words “surveilled” and “protected” simultaneously or cheering the surveillance system while using the Orwellian analogy to imply its coercive character. These user reviews, as well as state and media discourse, heavily contributed to normalizing Korea’s app by conducting everyday moralizations.
Furthermore, we argue that such defining and categorizing of ideal and deviant subjects distributed blame for disease transmission to individual users, and less on the state leadership or the surveillance system itself. Due to such displacement of blame, preventive efforts against the spread of COVID-19 were heavily concentrated on detecting and punishing deviant individuals as defined by the app. The individualization of blame was also identified when the apps produced systematic errors. Due to the instability of the geolocation data, both China and Korea’s apps produced countless errors including setting off false alarms (Korea) and designating wrong color codes (China). In these cases, it was users’ responsibility to prove their “innocence,” or “harmlessness” to state officials. The anxiety and frustration that users felt when encountering such errors are reflected in the following Korean blog post: “3:45 am: my designated civil servant called because he received an alarm that I went outside. Where else would I be at three in the morning? I felt like being wrongly accused. I opened the Google Maps and screen captured my current location, deleted and reinstalled the app to fix the error.”
As mentioned in this quote, Korean app users who encountered such errors utilized different methods to provide evidence that they were indeed at home—video calling their designated civil servants, taking a photo of their rooms, calling civil servants with a landline phone, were other examples commented by bloggers.
Similarly, in China, the responsibility of reporting and fixing the errors relied on users. Numerous posts on Weibo mentioned receiving wrong color codes, such as being assigned a red code when their family members who were together all the time received green. In these cases, users, left with much confusion and anxiety, could appeal their cases to local authorities. However, local authorities were often inaccessible and users were left unknown whether their codes would be modified or not. #HealthCodeTurnedRed became one of the trending hashtags on Weibo since those who encountered similar errors shared various folk theories that explain the mysterious changing of colors. Using city bicycles or passing by major public transportation stations were some of the popular theories explaining why the code turned red.
The case illustrated here shows that the opacity of these surveillance systems, along with the structures of vilification that constantly define and locate “deviant” subjects, have exported accountability of not only the spread of the disease but also the system’s imperfections to individual citizens. However, the majority of user reviews mentioned that dealing with such errors and enduring frustration were something that they need to bear with for the collective good. As exceptional levels of data surveillance and mobility control have been legitimized via constructing such moral infrastructures, the apps’ capacities for controlling risky individuals, despite their often messy and clunky functioning, were generally interpreted as a welcome affordance of state surveillance.
Technogovernance as a form of caring: COVID-19 apps as nationalist projects
Chinese and South Korean governments heavily mobilized nation-building language when describing their COVID-19 apps to both domestic and international audiences. To these states, the quarantine measures deployed to combat the spread of COVID-19 meant more than just public health management—rather, they were ripe opportunities to promote the nations’ technological competence and biosecurity capacity on the global stage. Both China and Korea’s state materials describing COVID-19 apps frequently used the word “exemplar,” “model,” and “standard,” to stress the nations’ technological superiority in crisis management, and the countries’ status as global providers of digital tools and know-how. For instance, naming Korea’s response model as “K-Quarantine,” the Korean government stated that “we are going to share Korea’s successful COVID-19 response model with the international community, including the use of advanced IT technology in contact tracing and managing self-isolated individuals with smartphone apps” (Cheongwadae, 2020). The Chinese government, similarly, boasted about the “Chinese speed” and “big data dividend” when describing the Health Code (Wang, 2020; Zhou, 2020). We suggest that such explicit expressions of national pride can be interpreted as deliberate attempts to recover the feelings of national identity and belonging in moments of uncertainty, which aligns with what de Kloet J et al. (2020) describe as “biopolitical nationalism.” As these COVID-19 apps and other digital infrastructures are presented as symbolic manifestations of national prowess, participating in them was translated as patriotic contributions. Meanwhile, raising concerns about the apps’ reliability ran a risk of being seen as acts of betrayal.
Such invocation of “communities of fate” (Ong, 2010: 20) was especially salient in user reviews from South Korea. How user reviews reinforced a sense of belonging and shared fate is reflected in the following quote from the Korean blog post: “I became a subject of thorough monitoring as I landed in Korea. Instead of being uncomfortable about this, I was impressed by my country’s rigorous system and care. #Korea_pride
Conjuring feelings of national identity and shared fate, such nationalist rhetoric articulated by users themselves constantly reshaped state–society relations. As structures of vilification mentioned above have constructed the image of the mass as careless in general and thus in need of state control, the state’s technogovernance arrived as a paternalistic form of caring and being responsible for protecting the health of a nation.
Despite such similarity, there was also a difference between China and Korea when communicating the state’s role. For China, the state leadership has been heavily criticized for early missteps and secrecy in dealing with COVID-19—the warnings coming from medical professionals were silenced and reports about the disease were missing from key state media for weeks, which severely undermined the public’s trust in the Chinese government. To restore such a damaged state–society relationship, themes around repair were dominant in the Chinese materials about the Health Code. Connotations of repair were articulated in two ways. First, it was invoked to emphasize the Health Code’s affordance to safely reopen, and thus, “repair” China’s economy, promising that this classification system would allow work and production to resume. Second, expressions of repair were mentioned as the CCP attempted to orchestrate positive feelings about state intervention and rebuild people’s trust. The Health Code and other data-driven pandemic responses were presented as solutions to this restoration, which is reflected in the catchphrase, “let data run more, let people run (get troubled) less” (Xiao, 2020). Boasting it as a “great prototype” that can “turn crisis into opportunities,” (Hu, 2020) state materials promised to repair not only the economy but also governance, through digital technologies.
Meanwhile, for South Korea, the coronavirus was predominantly conceptualized as a foreign threat. Thus, themes around safeguarding the nation from this “viral invasion” were frequently identified. As state efforts concentrated on securing the borders, immigration checkpoints were constructed as moralized spaces where not only already sick bodies, but “bodies-becoming-threatening” (Adey, 2009) can be preemptively managed via the mandatory installation of the app. Such moralizing work that vilified travelers led returning Koreans to internalize immense guilt for putting their country in danger by flying home. And this guilt encouraged travelers to truthfully follow app surveillance as a way to prove how “good citizens” they are: “I felt sorry for flying back to Korea, which was becoming COVID-clean. So I thought it was my duty to endure the discomfort and strictly track my bodily symptoms,” said one of the bloggers. This theme of endurance repeatedly emerged in user reviews as a presentation of one’s patriotic contribution to the nation’s health.
Practicing care: registering the apps as pandemic care infrastructures
So far, our analysis focused on discursive practices that normalized the deployment of China and Korea’s COVID-19 apps. This section concentrates on these technologies’ material, relational, and affective “doings” in everyday settings. What practices do the apps perform and what kinds of interactions do they forge between actors? What affects are designed into, or unexpectedly produced in the apps’ performance? And finally, what kinds of maintenance and repair work are involved for these apps to perform as designed, and who is responsible for this labor? Through these questions, this section examines how different actors have attuned their bodily and environmental conditions “to fit the profile of successful digital subjects”—what Sareeta Amrute (2019) calls “corporeal attunement” (p. 62). The section is structured under two themes: 1) material and affective doings of the apps, and 2) maintenance and repair.
Material and affective “doings” of the apps
One of the major roles of China and Korea’s COVID-19 apps is to classify risk groups and facilitate the allocation of care resources so that these “potential carriers” are appropriately registered to, and managed by the state system. In other words, the apps mainly functioned as intermediary platforms that aid human care work. First, our analysis of China’s Health Code revealed that the color-based categorization was used by community workers to efficiently distribute their attention to red and yellow-coded users. Previously, community workers had to individually call or knock door-by-door to document the health status of quarantined individuals with a risk of being infected. However, as described by state media, the Health Code allowed them to quickly and safely identify those who are supposed to be at home, and monitor their health remotely (Zhou, 2020). Moreover, the app was further upgraded to serve as a mediator between users and health workers in medical settings—when one went to a hospital, one’s color code and past inputs to the app were used as important materials for preliminary diagnosis and treatment. Alipay also integrated other health-related services to the app’s portal, connecting users to hospital appointment websites and online pharmacies. These examples reflect that the Chinese app performed as a channel between the users and the state/health officials, facilitating scarce care resources to be distributed more “efficiently.” However, the meaning of efficiency in this context did not include better distribution of care toward marginalized, vulnerable groups who were disproportionately affected by the pandemic, but rather indicated swift capturing of “risky bodies” under the state system. Hence, the rhetoric of efficiency functioned as a political tool to ignore more lingering and complex social problems.
In Korea’s case, the app’s main role was to connect users in home isolation with designated civil servants. They not only monitored whether users stayed in their homes but also, acted as main points of contact. Whenever users have questions regarding quarantine or have health issues, they could directly contact their designated civil servants via the app for help. These civil servants were also responsible for delivering care packages to users and calling them twice a day to check on their health. While some people found such frequent call-ups tiring, the majority of user blogposts expressed reassurance for having such a contact point and thanked civil servants for kindly responding to their concerns. Appreciation, relief, and feeling sorry about civil servants’ hard work were the most frequently detected emotions when users described their feelings about app tracking. “She sounded a bit exhausted today. She always answered my questions kindly, but it must be difficult to manage so many people day and night. I should save her trouble by strictly following the self-isolation rule,” commented a blogger. Such humane interactions involved in managing the quarantine system were critical in encouraging people to trust the state’s pandemic governance and to tolerate the system’s demand of heavy work on the user’s end. This finding suggests that the app itself was rarely the central actor that provided caretaking or the feeling of being cared for. Rather, it was other traditional forms of care practices, intimate human relations, and general trust toward the institutions that execute such infrastructures that encouraged users to comply.
Besides functioning as intermediaries between health/state officials and users, both apps also systemized daily self-tracking into people’s everyday routines, where we identified ambivalent attitudes from users. Some Korean users described that daily reporting of their health status constituted a major part of their quarantined lives—as the Korean app mandated self-reporting twice a day, at 10 am and 3 pm, reviews described the app’s notifications led users to maintain a regular lifestyle. Those who were sleeping late or forgot about self-reporting would receive calls from their designated civil servants. While being annoyed by such frequent interactions, these users said they nevertheless felt less anxious about their health because the app enforced them to accurately monitor their bodily symptoms: “Since I had to report my body temperature every day on the app, I checked it with a thermometer enclosed in the quarantine packet. 36.6°C. I was relieved I don’t have a fever [. . .] I found myself enjoying the self-check-up by the end of the quarantine.”
It is important to remind that at this early period of the pandemic, there was not enough scientific knowledge around SARS-CoV-2, and various rumors and folk theories on the symptoms of COVID-19 circulated on the Internet. Many user reviews expressed anxiety as it was difficult to determine whether they were showing symptoms of COVID or not. In this situation, the app’s standardized form of symptom checking, although its over-simplified categories do not capture all symptoms or account for asymptomatic cases, provided users a sense of control and agency in understanding their bodies.
Similarly, in China, social media discourse around the app described daily log-ins and self-reporting as helpful tools that delivered users a sense of reassurance. Also, the state news media and Alibaba’s social media accounts concentrated on attaching positive affects to the Health Code, by continuously communicating the message that the green code means “hope” (Xi, 2020). “Today, are you green?” became a widely used catchphrase as the green code was actively mobilized to represent not only mobility but also “trustworthiness” in daily interactions, as similarly identified in Liu and Graham’s (2021) interview study with the Health Code users. Businesses in the service industry publicly showed their employees’ green codes to customers as evidence of their health to present the company as honest and credible. In this regard, the Health Code was used as a form of authentication that proves one’s healthiness, functioning as a “digital passport” (Hu, 2020) that grants and limits access to certain places.
Taking care of the app: the invisible labor of maintenance and repair
Finally, this section investigates different kinds of maintenance and repair work that were required to make China and Korea’s COVID-19 apps function as designed. More specifically, we are interested in how users and community workers “took care” of these apps, labors that were indispensable to the routinization of China and Korea’s tech-based pandemic management.
In Korea’s case, the most noticeable maintenance work was discovered from the user’s end. Users had to perform various menial tasks, besides self-reporting and dealing with system errors, to assist the app’s “seamless” operation. For instance, they had to place their phones where cellular signals were undisturbed to activate location tracking at all times. Whenever the signal was bothered and location tracking paused, the designated civil servant called the users immediately asking their whereabouts. Hence, some users commented that they were restricted from their own domestic spaces, such as balconies, porches, and garages, where cellular signals were often weak. Furthermore, for the same reason, users had to constantly watch their phones and always keep them completely charged. Since the notification bar, which indicated whether location tracking was active or not, was always displayed on top of the screen, the app’s interface made them constantly aware of being monitored. As seen from these anecdotes, the functioning of Korea’s tech-based COVID-19 governance was dependent on various user labors, which included taking care of their devices and living within the technological constraints of the app.
Meanwhile, in China, such maintenance and repair work was heavily concentrated on community workers. As state officials realized that the Health Code is sometimes inflexible, they requested community workers to add a “human touch” and make the Health Code’s algorithm customizable to individual cases (Yuan, 2020). For instance, community workers physically visited those who did not possess smartphones and/or have access to the Internet to verify their health status and deliver them printed copies of health certificates. Filling forms and talking to people, community workers made sure these technologically marginalized individuals were familiar with and kept updated on the state’s quarantine system. These examples demonstrate how users and community workers were extended as essential human infrastructures of China and Korea’s tech-based pandemic governance. We brought to light such a contradiction between the invisible work of care that people performed in their daily lives to sustain the tech-based system, and the state’s spectacular promises of these surveillance technologies’ seamless, humanless operations.
Conclusion
This article examines how China and South Korea’s COVID-19 apps have constructed and normalized a particular form of technogovernance during the pandemic. Adopting the analytical framework of the politics of care, our analysis demonstrates how the discursive, relational, and material forces shaped the ways these COVID-19 apps were socially constructed in China and South Korea. First, media discourse around them actively constructed the structures of vilification that defined “deviant” users as targets of blame, and furthermore, promoted the apps as nationalist projects, rendering participation in state surveillance a patriotic commitment to one’s country. Such moral infrastructures thus contributed to rearranging state–society relations, in which enhanced state surveillance and control could be interpreted as a paternalistic form of caring. Based on this analysis, we further investigate the material and relational practices that these sociotechnical systems produced. Narrating various human and non-human labors that local authorities, community workers, users, and the apps performed, we illustrate the processes in which these apps penetrated users’ everyday lives, establishing new routines and daily rhythms that constructed a sense of pseudonormality while demanding undue labor.
Our analysis also demonstrates that inviting the concept of the politics of care within studies of surveillance technologies allows identifying more nuanced manifestations and articulations of surveillance. One example discovered from our investigation is when the users actively transferred their bodily data to the state authorities for “protection.” Trusting that mass surveillance would allow better management of the pandemic, user-subjects not only willingly documented and reported their personal information but also conducted daily maintenance and repair work in return for “state care.” Another example comes from what we would like to call selfless self-tracking, which was practiced by people who were suspected as potential carriers of the virus, such as recent travelers from overseas. These user-subjects voluntarily conducted meticulous symptom-tracking to make sure they do not pose a threat to local communities—thus, self-surveillance was conducted less for their own selves but more for others. We argue that the emergence of such different attitudes toward surveillance in China and South Korea is a product of multiple factors, including the state’s efforts to yoke “good citizen” to the adoption of these apps, active discursive practices that identify and villainize deviant users, and the everyday human interactions behind the apps that bring to light the flesh and soul behind these technologies.
We conclude by suggesting the future direction of this study. Examining the workings of power in the deployment of China and South Korea’s COVID-19 apps, we realized that the caring capacity that these surveillance technologies claim to distribute is embedded within the structures of vilification and scapegoating that by design, neglect the conditions of people on the margins who have been unequally impacted by the pandemic. For instance, in Korea’s case, such aggressive surveillance measures severely exacerbated the working environments of migrant workers from Southeast Asia since the majority of them lived in precarious housing conditions where it is impossible to maintain two-week isolation. There were many incidents where these workers had to violate the quarantine orders, fearing they might be laid off from work or evicted from workers’ dormitories, whereas these behaviors, again, made them easy targets of blame (Lee, 2020). As a follow-up study, we plan to investigate the consequences of these emergency surveillance technologies on such marginalized populations, whose accounts were largely invisible in news media and blog reviews. These stories would inform us of the ways these technologies can be harmful to some groups more than others, revealing for whom this form of “state care” is designed and at what expense.
A year and a half later after the first outbreak of the COVID-19 in Wuhan, both China and South Korea’s apps became widely popular in their respective countries. They are shifting from innovative to mundane, from an emergency practice to a routine. Although these apps themselves may extinguish after the pandemic, the inclination toward such tech-driven “fixes” in solving global emergencies would endure and revive. This article will be a valuable reference to critically examine the emergence and the consequences of these emergency technologies that may stay with us in various mutated forms.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the University of Michigan Digital Studies Institute’s Winter 2020 Research Award.
