China Now Looks to Rank Citizens on Health via Smartphone App

If you thought that China’s communist regime was leaning toward the authoritarian end of the spectrum before coronavirus, just wait until you see what they’re up to in the wake of it.

China has long hoped to take total control over the lives of their people.  They control the entire economy, they throw political dissidents and religious leaders into concentration camps, and they even have a “social credit” system that railroads their citizens into a sort of fiscal caste system.

Now, thanks to the coronavirus crisis, the leadership in Beijing has yet another way to infiltrate the private lives of the Chinese people.

A Chinese local government’s proposal for a post-coronavirus health app that ranks citizens based on their smoking, drinking, exercise and sleep habits has sparked fury online over privacy concerns

China has already developed apps that indicate an individual’s likelihood of contracting coronavirus based on their travel history and whether they had come into contact with an infected case.

Hangzhou, a high-tech hub and home to e-commerce giant Alibaba, was among the first Chinese cities to adopt such an app, which gives people a green, yellow or red code that determines if they can buy travel tickets or enter public places.

The new app would be far more powerful.

The software monitors users in real-time and ranks them on a 100-point “health gradient” scale, according to a post on the commission’s website.

According to shots of the app shared in the post, it ranks citizens out of the entire population of Hangzhou based on their health score, which changes according to the user’s daily actions.

For example, drinking a glass of white wine could set your score back by 1.5 points, while sleeping for seven hours could improve it by one point.

George Orwell is no longer rolling in his grave; he’s just about kicked the lid off of the darn thing.