The police warned Xie Yang not to go to Shanghai to visit the mother of a dissident. He went to the airport.
His phone's health code app was green, which made it possible for him to travel. He had not left his home city in weeks.
His app turned red and made him a high risk. Airport security tried to put him in a hospital. Mr. Xie accused the authorities of interfering with his health code to prevent him from traveling.
He said in a telephone interview in December that the Chinese Communist Party had a good model for controlling people. Mr. Xie, a government critic, was arrested by the police for inciting subversion and provoking trouble.
The Pandemic has given China's top leader a powerful case for widening the Communist Party's reach into the lives of more than one billion people, filling out his vision of the country as a model of secure order.
Chinese officials are turning their attention to other risks, including crime, pollution and hostile political forces, after their success in eliminating Covid. This is a potent techno-authoritarian tool for Mr. Xi as he increases his campaigns against corruption and dissent.
The health code is the foundation of the controls. The local authorities work with tech companies to generate a user's profile based on location, travel history, test results and other health data. The color of the code determines whether the holder is allowed into buildings or public spaces. Its use is enforced by a lot of local officials who have the power to restrict or stymy residents' movements.
The controls are important to China's goal of eliminating the virus entirely within its borders, despite the emergence of highly contagious versions. The zero Covid approach has helped keep infections low, even though the death toll continues to grow. Chinese officials have at times isolated young children from their parents or jailed people who broke containment rules.
The city did not respond to questions about Mr. Xie's assertions. The government has signaled it wants to use these technologies in other ways, even though it is hard to know what goes on in individual cases.
The officials used health monitoring systems to flush out fugitives. The health codes of fugitives have been used to track them down. People who avoided the apps have found life difficult.
China's surveillance system is labor intensive. Privacy concerns are growing as the public supports Beijing's intrusions during the Pandemic.
China's pandemic controls have produced great results, because they can monitor down to every individual, according to a woman who works at a dental hospital in eastern China.
If these means are still there for the government, it is a big risk for ordinary people.
The Covid cluster began with a funeral. 100 tracers sprang into action when a health worker tested positive for a drug.
The authorities in Hangzhou were told within hours that a potential carrier of the coronaviruses was at large, a man who had driven to the funeral days earlier. Government workers found and tested him.
Using digital health code records, teams of tracers plotted out a network of people to test based on where the man had been. In a couple of weeks, they stopped the chain of infections in the city.
The health code has been used to trace this outbreak. Residents sign up for the system by giving their personal information in one of the apps. Without the health code, people can't enter buildings, restaurants or even parks. China already had a large amount of ability to track people using location data from cellphones, but now it's much more expansive.
In recent months, the authorities in various cities have expanded their definition of close contact to include people whose cellphone signals were recorded within half a mile of an infectious person.
The experiment in using data to control the flow of people has helped keep Covid at bay. The same tools could give officials more power.
The City Brain center in Hangzhou pulls together data on traffic, economic activity, hospital use and public complaints to show how China can use technology.
Video cameras have been used to check whether residents are wearing masks. The district monitored power consumption to see if residents were following the orders. In order to notify officials if residents were allowed to return to their homes, the central city of Luoyang installed sensors on the doors.
Failures can have big repercussions with so much invested in technological solutions.
The health code system crashed twice in two weeks, disrupting the lives of residents who had to update their apps each day with proof that they had taken Covid tests.
In a recent assessment of China's response to Covid, a scholar at Fudan University wrote that officials may be neglecting other ways of protecting lives, such as expanding participation in public health programs.
The risk is that people become more marginalized as technology and power become more pervasive.
Over the past decade, the Communist Party has been shoring up its armies of grass-roots officials who carry out door-to-door surveillance. This older form of control has been improved by the party's new digital apparatus.
According to state media, one in every 250 adults in China has been affected by the outbreak. Under the grid management system, cities, villages and towns are divided into sections, sometimes just a few blocks, which are assigned to individual workers.
During normal times, their duties included pulling weeds, mediation and keeping an eye on potential troublemakers.
The duties grew as a result of the Pandemic.
Workers were given the task of recording the identities of people who entered the complexes. They helped those in the lock down take out their trash by calling residents to make sure they had been tested.
Powerful new tools were given to them.
The central government has directed the police, internet and telephone companies to share information about residents with community workers so they can decide if they are high-risk.
One of the new hires said that the ranks of grid workers tripled to more than 300 over the course of the Pandemic. Ms. Pan, who is responsible for about 2,000 residents, says she spends most of her time distributing information about new measures and encouraging vaccinations.
Ms. Pan said that she had to be on call at all times.
The pressure to stifle an outbreak can make officials overzealous and prioritize adherence to the rules no matter the cost.
A pregnant woman was refused medical care at the hospital because her Covid test result had expired hours before. She lost a baby and the public was angry. The heavy burden placed on low-level workers to stamp out infections was blamed by some.
It is always preferable to go too far than be too soft-handed, but that is the pressure created by the environment nowadays.
For defenders of China's stringent measures, the results are clear. The United States has recorded more deaths from coronaviruses than the country. In mid-January, officials announced zero new infections, and this past week the lockdown was lifted.
The government's success in limiting infections has earned it widespread support in other countries.
Ms. Pan said her job was easier now than it was at the start of the Pandemic. Residents argued when they were told to wear masks. She said that people have accepted the health measures.
She said that everybody takes them more seriously and is very cooperative.
Many people in China are worried that loosened controls could allow for a resurgence of Covid, according to Shen Maohua, who writes under the pen name of Wei Zhou.
He said in an interview that it is a kind of mental trade-off for many people.
How long will people find that exchange worthwhile? Social media users have complained about the apparent arbitrariness with which they can find themselves blocked from traveling because of software glitch or policies that vary by city.
The problems have been acknowledged by officials. An analysis of each province's criteria for a health code to turn from green to yellow was published by a state-run news outlet. The answer was not clear for most provinces.
You never know if your travel plans can be realized or if your itinerary will be canceled.
Government critics warn that the costs will go far beyond the ordinary.
Wang Yu, a well-known human rights lawyer, says she believes the authorities have weaponized the health code to try to stop her from working. She tried to log her travel on her health code app when she returned to Beijing. The drop-down menu listed only one city, Changzhou, where she had not been, and which had just recorded several infections. She would most likely be refused entry to Beijing if she chose that.
Security officers used to physically follow her. She is worried that they can restrict her movements from afar.
"Wherever you go, you'll never be lost," said Ms. Wang, who stayed with her relatives in Tianjin.
Less high-profile critics are vulnerable as well. Several local governments have pledged to keep a close eye on people who travel to Beijing or other cities to lodge complaints about officials because of their potential to violate travel restrictions.
Lin said that the health code can be used as a dirty trick for stability maintenance. He said that he was taken off a train by the police ahead of a meeting. He had not been near a confirmed case when his health code app turned yellow, so he had to return to Fuzhou.
The officials have promoted the use of virus control measures that are unrelated to the epidemic. The judge noticed that the grid workers were more thorough in their accounting of local residents than the census was.
He said that epidemic grid workers should find people they couldn't find before, or send summonses to places that were hard to reach before. Eighteen summonses were successfully delivered.
People in China are reassured that their health code data won't be abused. The central government is promising data privacy. Many Chinese people think that the authorities can get whatever they want.
The expansion of surveillance could make it easier for the authorities to break up dissenters, says a former journalist. He doesn't use the health code, but moving around is difficult, and he can't explain his reasons to workers at the checkpoint.
I can't tell them the truth because I'm resisting the health code.
Reporting and research were done by Joy Dong, Li You and Liu Yi.
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