A man walks past a sign about COVID-19 along a street in Beijing on December 11, 2022. Noel Celis/ AFP
And the central government is now beginning to unwind years of hardline policymaking, with the state-run "Communications Itinerary Card," which tracks whether someone has been to a high-risk area based on their phone signal, to go offline at 12 a.m. Tuesday. It is only one of a panoply of tracking apps that have governed everyday life in China throughout the pandemic, with most people still using local "health codes" run by their city or province to enter shops and offices.
"All the government actually loses by deleting those apps is a fast-track method of keeping certain people at home based on a public safety rationale," she wrote on Twitter.