The Venue Code: Digital Surveillance, Spatial (Re)organization, and Infrastructural Power During the Covid Pandemic in China

Abstract

China has insisted on a zero-Covid policy for almost three years, deploying many disciplinary containment measures and surveillance tools. This chapter examines a surveillance tool called the “venue code” which is claimed to improve contact tracing of Covid outbreaks. My research is based on ethnography and discourse analysis of online textual and visual materials, capturing the integration of the venue code into China’s Covid containment regime. I analyze four aspects of the practice: bureaucratic structures, integration, spatial (re)organization, and technologies. I argue that the venue code mediates residents’ experience of cities and restricts urban mobility through the introduction of physical and digital infrastructure, while granting local actors more power. By doing so, this study draws attention to the ways in which the responsibility for achieving the zero Covid objective was shifted onto local actors and Chinese citizens, and state presence in communities and despotic power were strengthened.