‘Hold on to the Green Horse’: Popular Imaginations of the Health Code and the Cultivation of Algocratic Attunement in China in the COVID Era

Abstract

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Health Code played a decisive role in regulating Chinese citizens’ everyday activities, where securing a green code became essential. This article examines an outburst of popular discourses around the ‘green code’ and its homophone ‘green horse’ on a popular Chinese platform, Xiaohongshu, revealing the multifarious ways in which people imagine and experience this algorithmic technology—whether as an instrumental task, an object of romanticization, or a trigger of casual superstition. Such discourses betray an assortment of dispositions and responses that I call ‘algocratic attunment’, including proactive endorsement, pragmatic complicity, and convivial nonchalance. Entangled with consumerist culture, algocratic attunement is quietly cultivated by a host of private actors on social media, shoring up a sociocultural climate conducive to algorithmic governance.