Angry bank customers who traveled to a city in central China to retrieve their savings from troubled rural banks were blocked by Chinese authorities through the covert use of a health app on their cellphone.
The Chinese government requires all residents to have the health app, which displays a code indicating their health status, including possible exposure to COVID-19. A green code is required to use public transportation and to enter locations such as offices, restaurants and malls. Depositors at the banks in central Henan province had their health codes mysteriously flipped to red in order to stop them.
The incident has started a national debate on how a tool designed for public health was appropriated by political forces to tamp down controversy.
The issue started in April, when customers of six rural banks in Henan and Anhui provinces found they could not access online banking services. They tried to contact the banks and access their funds, but didn’t get replies.
Thousands of people then began trying to withdraw their savings after media reports that the head of the banks’ parent company was on the run. The majority shareholder of several of the banks, Sun Zhenfu, was wanted by authorities for “serious financial crimes,” according to the official media outlet The Paper. Authorities likely feared a bank run, which is not uncommon with smaller banks in China that tend to be less stable than their larger, institutional counterparts.
Unable to resolve the issue online, customers traveled to the provincial capital of Zhengzhou in order to demand government action at the Henan province office of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission. But after arriving in the city, they found they couldn’t go very far.
In a since-deleted account on the social media app WeChat, a woman surnamed Ai said shortly after she checked into a hotel in Zhengzhou, she was questioned by a group of police who asked her why she was there. She replied that she wished to withdraw money from the bank. Shortly after, she found her health code had turned red even though she had a negative COVID-19 test result in the previous 48 hours. She was immediately taken to a quarantine hotel by a pandemic prevention worker.
Sixth Tone interviewed over a dozen people who said their health codes unexpectedly turned red after they scanned a QR code upon arrival in the city. In China, places like train stations and grocery stores have QR codes to scan at their entrances, logging people’s presence for contact tracing during the pandemic. When people are deemed to be at risk for COVID-19, their codes are turned different colors that indicate restrictions such as mandatory quarantines. With a red health code, it’s impossible to go to any public venues, or even to board a train.
One bank customer, who gave her last name as Liu, said she saw that many people were reporting their health codes had turned red immediately after arriving in Zhengzhou. Liu, who did not go to Zhengzhou herself, said she tested the code change after others reported it in their shared group chat. While at home far away from the capital, Liu scanned the QR code from a photo someone had shared on social media, Liu's health code also turned red (despite never having left her home).
Another bank customer said that he got a red code after scanning in at the train station in Zhengzhou and was taken into police custody. A few hours after police officers made him leave Zhengzhou, his health code turned green.
Jiakedao, a social media account run by the main Communist Party newspaper, criticized the Henan authorities, saying “Let’s be frank, no matter which department or individual instigated it, arbitrarily using the epidemic prevention and control measures for ‘social governance’ or ‘stability maintenance’ should be strictly held accountable."
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