Note: everything is tied to cell number in China — see quote from your own reference:
To help the nationwide social-mapping effort — and, I suspect, feed the government’s ever-growing appetite for personal data — I begrudgingly gave my mobile number to government workers at every train station, checked in via smartphone app to enter office buildings and recited my passport number just to eat at a rare restaurant that remained open.
and
As restrictions on mobility tightened last month, the lowest unit of the Chinese government that I never paid attention to — the neighborhood committees — suddenly loomed large in my life. The first day of my quarantine, workers brought me inside a district office swarming with 20- and 30-something volunteers to collect information about my identity, my travel history, my workplace.
Your original comment:
[quote=FlyerInHi]ucodegen, you’re giving China too much credit for running a dystopian surveillance state. It’s actually very easy to travel in and out of China. They just don’t tolerate critics or political dissidents. Freedom of movement is just like here in USA. The only difference is that residents cannot get social services but at their bonafide hometowns. it’s difficult to change hometown registration.[/quote]
Also look up China’s “Social Credit”. Say something that the establishment does not like, and your access to loans and jobs disappears. Imagine the US.. say something that Trump does not like and your access to loans and jobs disappears…
When I made the original comment about their surveillance state – I also was aligning it to the possibility that it was core to their faster recovery from COVID-19 and that implementing something similar would be problematic in the US and other democracies.
