China’s bank run victims planned to protest. Then their Covid health codes turned red

CNN — Liu, a 39-year-old tech worker in Beijing, arrived in the central city of Zhengzhou on Sunday with all the boxes ticked to travel under China’s stringent Covid restrictions. But when Liu scanned a local QR code to exit the Zhengzhou train station, his health code came back red – a nightmare for any traveler in China, where freedom of movement is strictly dictated by a color-code system imposed by the government to control the spread of the virus. Qiu, a teacher, had not been to Henan to protest, but his health code also turned red on Sunday evening after he scanned a QR code from Zhengzhou. Last November, Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer in the southern city of Changsha, said on Twitter that his health code turned red on the morning he was about to board a flight to Shanghai to visit the mother of Zhang Zhan, a citizen journalist imprisoned for reporting on China’s initial coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. “The opacity of the health code, the ability of it to arbitrarily control people’s movement while giving people few means to effectively appeal the app’s decision, makes it an especially abusive system.” Code turns green again From the Zhengzhou train station, Liu, the depositor from Beijing, was taken to a room where several other travelers with red health codes were present.