Studia Neophilologica
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/snec20
QR codes and the sentient city
Anna Greenspan
To cite this article: Anna Greenspan (2021): QR codes and the sentient city, Studia
Neophilologica, DOI: 10.1080/00393274.2021.1916993
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2021.1916993
Published online: 17 May 2021.
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A. GREENSPAN
a QR code, marks an important evolution in the city’s machinic environment. In this new
urban atmosphere, this essay contends, the familiar framework, which opposes surveil
lance with privacy, is no longer adequate. Rather, I suggest, we should look for the new
manifestations of an old tension, which has not disappeared, between the visible and the
invisible; between that which can be sensed, examined, and modelled and that which
remains hidden, cryptic and concealed.
QR codes
QR codes were initially used for tracking components in the car manufacturing sector.
They quickly spread to other industries all across East Asia. The codes are particularly
useful at providing an easy way to trace highly sensitive items like food and pharmaceu
ticals. In China mobile phones equipped with cameras that operated as QR code readers
entered the market in 2010. Soon after life in the metropolis was utterly transformed. By
the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the codes had become
ubiquitous in the Chinese city and the techno-corporeal practice of scanning a QR code
had become an intrinsic part of the urban infrastructure. In Shanghai, when your phone
runs out of batteries, you are stuck. Without the capacity to scan a QR code you cannot get
a bike, you cannot rent a charger, you cannot pay for anything. More than texting or
talking, watching, listening or way finding, today, in China at least, QR codes are the cell
phones killer app (Jiang 2019).
QR codes were developed in 1994 by a Japanese company called Denso Wave, who
specialised in barcode readers. Denso Wave was responding to user requests for a system
that was data rich enough to encode not only alphanumerics but Kanji and Kana script as
well. Their simple, low-tech solution consisted of square black and white pictographs
whose vertical and horizontal axis can hold 100 times more information than a barcode.
Barcodes, which encode information on only one axis are usually limited to no more than
20 characters. QR codes are two-dimensional – readers scan up and down as well as
across. This increased complexity allows them to encode over 4000 characters. In expand
ing beyond alphanumerics into a system that can include Chinese characters as well, the
codes (as a linear string of letters and numbers) went from being signs that humans
could – if not read – then at least comprehend, to becoming an image that appears to us
as indecipherably abstract. Unlike linear one-dimensional barcodes, QR codes are intelli
gible only to machines.
QR codes embed data – including internet addresses – directly into the physical
environment. They are the semiotic of the wireless city, transforming a previously inert
physical landscape into the nodes of an all-pervasive locative media. They operate as
a bridge between the physical and the virtual, the digital and the analog, allowing spaces,
images and objects to immediately connect with the unseen wireless atmosphere. QR
codes act as portals, connecting offline and online worlds (O2O). In China by 2020, the
urban environment was teeming with such portals. The simple black and white images
are cheap and easy to produce. People used them to provide information on everything
from gallery exhibits to heritage architecture. ‘Scanning a QR code can bring you to
a website, or pull up an app, or connect you to a person’s social media profile’, writes
technology analyst Mara Hvistendahl (2017). ‘Codes started showing up on graves (scan
to learn more about the deceased) and the shirts of waiters (scan to tip). Beggars printed
STUDIA NEOPHILOLOGICA
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out QR codes and set them out on the street’, she observes. People used them to track
their pets. They also play a crucial role in the vast economy of home delivery. Over the last
decade, the markets and street stalls of downtown Shanghai have largely disappeared.
Migrants, who once served as vendors now traverse the city on electric scooters, working
as the delivery system for an enormous population that now shop on their phone. City
dwellers commonly order groceries and appliances, fancy meals and private chefs, coffee,
bubble tea and street snacks. This consumer behaviour – which has accelerated enor
mously by the Coronavirus pandemic – feeds an emerging spectral, animated, and
sentient city, which is built on a complex logistical machinic infrastructure that underlies
the everyday communication between mobile phones and QR codes.1
Mobile money: WeChat and Alipay
QR codes became so pervasive in the Chinese urban environment because they were
incorporated in a mobile payment system, one of the most crucial features of which is the
capacity for micropayments. As Chenxin Jiang (2019) notes, ‘American consumers are
used to a minimum amount below which smaller shops may not accept a credit card: with
mobile payments, no charge is too minor’. As a channel for micropayments, QR codes are
found everywhere, from temples asking for donations to wedding parties collecting gifts.
They are the preferred mode of payment in stores, restaurants, wet markets and street
food stands. In addition to daily purchases, the ubiquitous black and white pictograms are
used to pay utility bills, conduct business transactions, and exchange money between
family and friends.
In crossing over into the realm of digital money, QR codes have become vastly more
successful in China than almost anywhere else in the world. There is a cluster of inter
connected reasons. First, China remained primarily a cash-based economy well into the
start of the twenty-first century. Even after decades of enormous economic growth, credit
cards were difficult to obtain and not widely used. ‘During the past 30 years, China has
grown to become the world’s second largest economy without much of a functioning
credit system at all’, Hvistendahl (2017) notes. She continues: ‘The People’s Bank of China,
the country’s central banking regulator, maintains records on millions of consumers, but
they often contain little or no information. Until recently, it was difficult to get a credit
card with any bank other than your own’. Another factor favouring the adoption of QR
codes was the rapid and widespread adoption of smart-phones. The fast and cheap
shanzhai manufacturing of Shenzhen flooded low-end markets with inexpensive knock
off phones that almost everyone could afford. These were ideal conditions for the
emergence of China’s ‘two QR driven super apps’: Wechat and Alipay.
Alibaba launched its escrow-based finance system now known as Ant Financial or
Alipay in 2004, ten years after QR codes were invented. In China’s low trust society,
technologically driven security proved immensely popular. In 2011, the company intro
duced Alipay as a mobile payment app, with a built-in QR code system at its core. In the
1
The idea of the ‘sentient city’ refers to the distributed, cognitive technologies that are embedded throughout the
metropolis, and increasingly enable the city to sense, model and gain knowledge of itself. The sentient city involves
a dispersed and bottom-up transformation of the urban landscape. The idea is thus in contrast with much of the
thinking and practice around ‘smart cities’, which tends to involve a planned and centralised conception of urban
technology. For more on these ideas see: Thrift 2014; Gabrys 2010; Bratton 2017; Hayles 2017.
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A. GREENSPAN
first year alone, mobile payments on Alipay reached 70 USD billion dollars (see
Hvistendahl 2017). Soon after, Ant Financial became the highest valued fintech company
in the world. 2011 was also the year that China’s other massive telecom company,
Tencent, released its messaging service Wechat. Initially, the built in QR code scanners
gave Wechat users an easy way to connect with new contacts. Two years later, in 2013,
Wechat introduced their own mobile-payment system that was built on the company’s
previous currency, QQ coins, which could be used to traffic within the Tencent environ
ment. With We Chat, this payment system broke free from the limits of the virtual and
entered the physical world.
On Chinese New Year 2014, a critical threshold was crossed as an aggressive marketing
campaign targeted the tradition of gifting red envelopes filled with cash (hongbao 紅包).
As Chen et al. (2018: 66) report, ‘That evening, for every minute during peak time, WeChat
Pay had more than 4.8 million participants and 25,000 envelopes opened during its “New
Year Red Envelope” scheme’. The following year, as the year of the goat gave way to
the year of the monkey, WeChat reported trade in one billion virtual red envelopes. Lured
in by holiday money, millions of users signed up for the company’s mobile payment
system. ‘On Chinese New Year’s Eve in 2016ʹ, Chen et al. (2018: 63) note, ‘more than
2.3 billion Red Packets flooded through WeChat, and the number skyrocketed to 14 billion
on Chinese New Year 2017ʹ. Jack Ma, the flamboyant CEO of Alibaba, Tencent’s main rival,
likened WeChat’s red envelope campaign to a ‘Pearl Harbour attack’. By 2018 WeChat was
close to a billion users and Tencent, once notorious for stealing ideas from elsewhere, had
become one of the most profitable and innovative Internet companies in the world.
Media theorist Finn Brunton (2018: 185) argues that the Wechat wallet transformed the
media climate by ‘making money conversational’. Hongbao, he argues, is just like ‘another
kind of emoji, another set of stickers – a messaging practice and a way of texting’. In China
this ‘chatification’ of money took hold almost instantaneously and came to permeate
Chinese social media. It also became interwoven in the explosion of the sharing economy,
which was made a national priority by the government in late 2015. (See Asia Society
2018). Suddenly, shared bikes – accessed through QR code generated micropayments –
flooded the streets. This experiment in public transport paved the way for a more wide
spread sharing economy that quickly grew to include small scale popular items like
umbrellas and cell phone chargers. By 2018 China – with a transaction volume of 5.8
trillion dollars – had become the largest and fastest-growing market for mobile payments
in the world.2
Social credit system
Throughout this period there was concern that the emerging cashless society was helping
consolidate China’s techno-authoritarian rule. Anxiety coalesced around the idea of the
social credit system. Dystopian descriptions tended to combine, and sometimes confuse,
two different credit rating systems. The first, called Zhima, or Sesame credit, was set up by
Alipay in 2015. Before then, as Rogier Creemers (2018) explains, Chinese banks had tried,
with great difficulty, to set up a financial credit score: ‘At that time, comparatively few
Chinese citizens held bank accounts, and the majority of transactions were settled in cash,
2
See CBN Editor 2018 and Jao 2018.
STUDIA NEOPHILOLOGICA
5
making it more difficult to provide adequate and accurate credit scores. By 2012, only
280 million citizens were reported to have a credit report’. Alipay’s system tapped into
a giant, already existing user base. The company deployed big data analytics to evaluate
purchases and online behaviour in order to generate individual credit scores. Customers
with good credit ratings gained easier access to loans and, through tie-ins with the super
app, special deals on shopping, apartments and hotels, as well as deposit free rentals, and
even streamlined visa applications.
The wider and more ominous notion of social credit involves an integrated state-run
system that uses a point-based score to engineer behaviour. Travel without a valid train
ticket, refuse to stop at a red light, cheat on your taxes and points will be deducted. This
type of technological system constructs the subject as user and then works to gamify
conduct, deploying carrots as well as sticks. The rating scheme operates by monitoring
contacts, texts and voice messages as well as a whole host of offline behaviour.
Theoretically, the system can be used to monitor and modify an enormous range of
actions and attitudes. Even when still in its infancy, restricted to small, local experiments
that varied across cities and regions, the idea of a single government issued social credit
was viewed with alarm. Commentators frequently likened it to a Black Mirror style science
fiction nightmare, in which all urban inhabitants were captured in an inescapable atmo
sphere of total control.
Tencent and Alibaba are private companies and state cooperation is a matter of
contestation. Details around data privacy and government access are murky and the
politics of public-private collaboration are complex and opaque. ‘The stereotypical wes
tern view that private corporations in China are puppets of the state’, writes Kevin Liu
(2019: 5) should be challenged. It is ‘just as important to see the relationship between the
state and private corporations as one which involves changing and persisting negotia
tions, competitions, conflicts of interest, as well as collaborations and struggles over
power’. Friction has surfaced around a number of pivotal issues, including important
differences in state-owned and private sector banking, censorship, which hinders com
panies’ global ambitions, as recent controversies over TikTok and Zoom make clear, as
well as the decisive matter of real name registration, which as Arsene (2018) notes, ‘meant
the cancellation of millions of unverified accounts’. In all these matters, agendas and
interests are far from neatly aligned: ‘There are more complicated negotiations, conflicts,
as well as collaborations between the state and the private sector’, notes Liu (2019: 6),
‘than is suggested by a simplified depiction of an Orwellian dystopia’.
Nonetheless, Liu maintains, it is important to recognise the unique historical circum
stances and climate of government support that made possible the emergence and
conglomeration of China’s giant Internet corporations. In certain areas of digital govern
ance (like the Internet Plus project) public and private are totally intermeshed. More
widely, it is typical in China for national, regional, city and district governments to
outsource administrative functions to a dynamic marketplace of tech companies, domi
nated by Tencent and Alibaba. At the World AI Conference in Shanghai in 2019, for
example, a myriad of products offering automated governance and algorithmic urban
expertise – including health care, waste management, private security and traffic sys
tems – were on display. Analysing Tencent’s role in this political economy of social
surveillance, Liu (2019: 6) argues that the governance of contemporary China occurs
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A. GREENSPAN
through a partnership between big tech and big government, which is best understood as
a ‘commercial-state surveillance complex’.
While the abstract idea of social credit must be distinguished from the credit rating
systems designed by China’s giant fintech companies, there has been real anxiety that
Alipay’s credit score would be tied to government plans to create a social credit system of
their own.3 ‘Alipay has already cooperated with the Chinese government in one important
way’, Hvistendahl (2017) reports. ‘It has integrated a blacklist of more than 6 million
people who have defaulted on court fines into Zhima Credit’s database’.
QR code health registration scheme
The QR code health registration scheme was developed through a singular partnership
between public and private sphere. The roll out of the QR code system began in midFebruary in Hangzhou, the city where Alibaba – who were deeply involved in the
development of the technology – is headquartered. The QR code was added as
a feature directly into Alipay. Residents of Hangzhou were given a QR code on their
mobile phone that represented their health status; as Harris (2020) notes, ‘Users are
instructed to fill out an online report, complete with an ID number, recent travel history,
and a list of any possible symptoms of an illness’. Register and you were given a coloured
QR code, which could be scanned before entering subways, shopping malls, office
buildings, apartment complexes, coffee shops, night clubs and tourist sites. A green
code meant access to the city was open, yellow and movement was much more circum
scribed. With a red code a rigorously monitored 14-day quarantine was imposed. The
metropolis was locked and residents had no choice but to stay inside.
Alibaba maintains that, on the first day, their app received ten million visits (Jao 2020)
and it is reported (Davidson 2020) that the ‘Alipay Health code’ spread to more than 100
cities within a week. Tencent, China’s other tech giant, was also involved in early imple
mentation. They introduced a QR code tracking feature into their platform WeChat,
piloting the scheme in the Southern, coastal city of Shenzhen. ‘The speed and adoption
of these two appsis stunning’, writes China tech watcher Dev Lewis (2020a). Tencent
reported that by March 10 its ‘health-code covered 900 million users with the app used
more than 1.6 billion times across 300 hundred cities and counties. More recent data on
May 8 on Civil Affairs Ministry claims 1 billion users with the code used 20 billion times’.
The QR code health registration system is the latest manifestation of China’s singular
mode of techno-authoritarian rule, which has been eagerly employed in the management
of the twenty-first century metropolis. QR codes were deployed as an enforcement
mechanism in Shanghai’s massive garbage sorting and recycling campaign, which went
into effect in 2019. The codes played a more ominous role in the harsh crackdown in
Xinjiang, where they served as a tracking mechanism, placed on the doors of Uighur
residents and on any household tools that could potentially be transformed into
a weapon; see Ma 2018.
After the Wuhan outbreak, the algorithmic mode of urban management intensified.
Anxiety deepened around this strengthening control. Despite widespread adoption, there
is growing concern around the use of the apps. By June 2020, Alibaba had already
3
For more on social credit see Shazeda (2019) and Daum (2017).
STUDIA NEOPHILOLOGICA
7
proposed that the health code system should extend beyond the pandemic and many
grew apprehensive that the ‘new normal’ (Lewis 2020b) of hyper surveillance once
introduced will not go away. The system has been widely criticised for lack of transpar
ency. There are numerous accounts (Davidson 2020) of frustrated users left with no
recourse when their codes switched colour without any apparent justification. Demands
have amplified in China for regulation around the safeguarding of data privacy. In early
February, at the start of the pandemic, the Cyberspace Administration of China outlined
guidelines for the protection of personal information; see Creemers et al. 2020. Despite
the reassurances, however, there is little doubt that the QR code health registration
system consolidated intermingling between Tencent, Alibaba and the state. Questions
about personal data, surveillance, and authoritarian rule have become increasingly urgent
and acute.
Plague town
Albert Camus ends his novel The Plague (1960) with the image of pestilence as
a potentiality that haunts all of history. The plague ‘never dies or disappears for good’,
he writes (1960: 252), but lurks, lying ‘dormant for years and years’, until the day comes
when, ‘for the bane and enlightening of men’, it is roused once more. For Camus (1960:
34), the ongoing possibility of pestilence operates as an absolute curtailment of freedom;
an abstract expression of power and control.
A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence
is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away [. . .] Our townsfolk [. . .] thought
that everything was still possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impos
sible. They went on doing businesses, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should
they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels
journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will
ever be free so long as there are pestilences.
Michel Foucault, likewise, saw in the management of the plague the ultimate expression
of biopolitical power. In Discipline and Punish (1975), the model of the panopticon is not
the prison, as is often assumed, but rather the plague town. The chapter ‘Panopticism’
begins with a detailed description of the inspections, registrations, closures and quar
antines that are strictly enforced in a town infected by the plague at the end of the
seventeenth century. Unlike the exclusions that were imposed in the treatment of
leprosy, the administration of the plague, Foucault argues, involves establishing
a regime of total surveillance. In the ‘political dream of the plague’, he writes (2012:
184), ‘the gaze is alert everywhere’. It penetrates ‘even the smallest details of everyday
life [. . .] not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual
of his “true” name, his “true” place, his “true” body, his “true” disease’ (186). The city
infected with pestilence and placed under quarantine functions as an idealised model
for Foucault (2012: 188):
The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation,
writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in
a distinct way over all individual bodies—this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city.
The plague (envisaged as a possibility at least) is the trial in the course of which one may
define ideally the exercise of disciplinary power.
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A. GREENSPAN
From the start, Foucault’s work on power/knowledge has focused on the study of sickness
and health. His second book, The Birth of the Clinic (1994), details the epistemic shift as
medical observation transitioned from the space of the family and home to that of the
modern hospital. Sickness was removed from the messiness of everyday life and brought
into the clean, scientific space of the institution where it could be more easily analysed, as
Armstrong (1995: 395) explains:
Under Bedside Medicine, illness was best identified in the natural space of the patient’s own
home; in Hospital Medicine it required the ‘neutral’ space of the hospital so that the indicators
of the underlying lesson might be properly identified without the contaminants of extra
neous ‘noise’.
Foucault (1994) documents how this transformation involved the production of a ‘Medical
Gaze’, which constituted the body as the locus of disease.
Hospital medicine emerged in conjunction with public health’s increasing role in the
administration of the modern metropolis. Nineteenth century cities were crowded and
unsanitary and municipal government was strengthened to manage new forms of urban
disease. David Rosner (2010), in his study of public health in the early twentieth century,
details how changes in critical infrastructure, as well as revolutionary discoveries in
bacteriology and the rise of sanitation helped transform urban conditions. With these
developments, medicine was further consolidated as a means of legal and political
control.
It was into this new urban atmosphere that the Spanish Flu arrived. Attempts to control
the deadly epidemic involved an important alteration in the regime of ‘Hospital Medicine’,
as it was described by Foucault (1994). With the plague, it is the urban body, and not just
the human body, that is considered healthy or diseased. Camus begins his book with
a description of Oran, a modern, uninspired, commercial town. As the novel unfolds, it
becomes clear that the city itself plays a central character in the story. ‘What is striking
about Camus’ plague’, writes Stuart Elden (2003: 242) in his prescient essay, ‘is that it is the
town which is infected, rather than just the people’.
Foucault (1994: 2) maintains, in accordance with his conception of discontinuous
history, that ‘the exact superposition of the “body” of the disease and the body of the
sick man is no more than a historical, temporary datum’. David Armstrong (1995) adheres
to this insight, arguing that the early twentieth century saw the rise of ‘Surveillance
Medicine’, which involved a fundamental remapping of the spaces in which illness occurs.
‘The illness begins to leave the three-dimensional confine of the volume of the human
body’, he writes (1995: 395), ‘to inhabit a novel extracorporeal space’. Malady, which is
now located outside the body of the sick, becomes a feature of a larger temporal-spatial
community. The monitoring gaze of ‘Surveillance Medicine’ reconfigures illness based on
the anticipatory time of prediction and risk.
This collapsed temporality, in which the probability of future outcomes is used to
determine the present, intensifies in the treatment of a sudden epidemic. Fighting the
plague, which depends on managing outbreaks and controlling contagion, requires
a constant modelling of the future. Illness is reconfigured to produce a virtual mapping
of the space-time of the city, which is based on potential exposure. Public health uses
societal regulation (the wearing of masks, the closing of businesses, offices and schools
and by forbidding large-scale congregations). More importantly, ‘Surveillance Medicine’
STUDIA NEOPHILOLOGICA
9
takes complete control of the urban landscape, forcing draconian lock downs – in
Shanghai during the Wuhan outbreak apartment blocks, roads and alleys were suddenly,
overnight, boarded up and blocked off. During the Spanish Flu there were a number of
similarly aggressive public health campaigns, as Rosner (2010: 39) tells us:
In many cities, new movie theaters and vaudeville halls were closed or dramatically altered
their schedules. Work schedules were staggered to lessen crowding on public transportation
[. . .] quarantine, isolation, public propaganda, warnings, anti-spitting campaigns, legal restric
tions on commercial activities, inspection, surveillance, and mandated (often public) identi
fication and (perhaps) stigmatization—were all employed.
Today, writes Rosner (2010: 46), ‘despite our advances, the basic means of addressing
influenza remain the same as those nearly a century ago. Public health education,
isolation, sanitation, lessening congestion, closures, and surveillance are essential tools’.
The seen and the unseen
China’s QR code health registration system is a means of regulating urban flows. This
mode of technological tracking has the capacity for anonymity, yet, in the Chinese
context, especially after the implementation of the ‘real name registration’ policy, the
monitoring of mobile data has become enmeshed in an expanding regime of bio
surveillance. ‘The “real name registration” system for purchasing a SIM card’, as Dev
Lewis (2020b) explains, ‘means that smartphones are de facto personal ID cards – any
app sign-up or activity online is linked to a person’s national ID’. Lewis documents how
this regime of ubiquitous cell phone activity, associated directly with identity, has pro
duced fears of a Digital Leviathan in China. The vast data hungry mobile platforms desire
conditions of total surveillance and it is becoming increasingly difficult to escape the
vigilant watchfulness of the machinic eye. The QR code health registration system, which,
ultimately is a mechanism for the enforcement of quarantine, is a potent manifestation of
this intensifying bio disciplinary control.
Yet, as China’s success in managing the virus makes clear, it is also a powerful
epidemiological tool. With everyone carrying a cellular device, ‘the flow of each person
can be clearly seen’, says celebrated epidemiologist Li Lanjuan. ‘We should make full use’
of such new technologies, she advises, ‘to find the source of infection and contain the
source of infection’ (in Yingzhi & Zhu 2020). In this novel machinic landscape of a wireless
plague town, the familiar discourse which opposes surveillance and privacy – understood
as the political and legal protection of individual rights – no longer suffices. In 18 Lessons
of Quarantine Urbanism,which was written amidst the pandemic, media theorist Benjamin
Bratton (2020) argues that in the ‘epidemiological view of society’, which has emerged to
manage the covid-19 emergency, ‘the way we define, interpret, discuss, deploy and resist
“surveillance” has shifted decisively [. . .] It is a mistake to reflexively interpret all forms of
sensing and modelling as “surveillance” and active governance as “social control”’, he
continues. ‘We need a different and more nuanced vocabulary of intervention’.
One flaw in the idea of surveillance is that it tends to presume an Orwellian omnis
cience – a political overlord – that stands above the system of which it is apart. This
conceptual model does not pay sufficient attention to the fact that underneath or along
side these new forms of techno-autocratic capture, is an emerging machinic plane that is
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A. GREENSPAN
fundamentally non-anthropomorphic in nature. Our techno-corporeal practices are con
structing a virtual – and increasingly sentient city – that no transcendent authority or
agent can fully comprehend.
Writing about RFIDs, N. Katherine Hayles (2009: 48) notes that the topic of surveillance
is primarily epistemological; its ultimate question is ‘who knows what about whom’.
Shoshana Zuboff (2020) echoes this insight. The key question of the smart city, she claims,
is: ‘Who is smart? Who knows?’.4 Yet, ‘the political stakes of an animate environment’, as
Hayles (2009: 47) goes on to elaborate, ‘involve the changed perceptions of human
subjectivity in relation to a world of objects that are no longer passive and inert. In this
sense RFID is not confined only to epistemological concerns but extends to ontological
issues as well’.
In this new ontological environment, the idea of surveillance needs to be reformulated.
Wireless tracking systems, Bratton (2020) argues, are not just the tools of a police state,
they also constitute the ‘sensing layer’ of the stack. This role as perceptive device has been
accentuated by the global pandemic as successful treatment of the disease requires richer
and more sophisticated techniques of technological observation.5 With the coronavirus,
Bratton (2020) writes, ‘testing and sensing are the same thing. More testing is better
sensing, which means better models, which means better public health response’. The QR
code health registration system is an evolution in the city’s powers of sensation. It is no
longer just individual locations or things that can be perceived. Now, the body – extended
to incorporate the mobile phone – has become embedded in a semiotic environment that
is machinically intelligible. You and your phone become the signal trace of a circulating
agent that helps constitute the urban atmosphere. This increased capacity for sensation,
modelling, observation and governance is a critical feature of the twenty-first century city.
It is what makes a place resilient, allowing it to function in the midst of a crisis.
In this new media sphere, the legal and bureaucratic institutions that uphold the
notion of privacy no longer seem adequate. Privacy has not disappeared, but it has
mutated. One way of thinking about this transformation is to turn to the Chinese
intellectual traditions and consider the abstract dichotomy between concealment and
visibility, the seen and the unseen, what is shown and what is hidden, light and shadow,
yin and yang, that has been so richly articulated by scholars of the past. In his commentary
on the ancient classic the Yijing, Neoconfucian philosopher Wang Fuzhi 王夫之(1619–
1692) describes the decomposition and the manifestation of things through the inter
relation between the ‘hidden’ and the ‘visible’. ‘Each hexagram has twelve lines, one half is
hidden, the other is visible. Correspondingly, the Yijing does not speak of being and
nonbeing’, he writes, ‘but only of concealment and visibility’ (Schafer 2001: 264; qtd.
original).
‘Surveillance Medicine’, when mobilised to deal with an outbreak of plague, is pro
duced through the interplay of stealth and discovery. Due to the role of asymptomatic
carriers, Coronavirus has been called the ‘invisible enemy’. Urban sensing aims to track
vectors of infection even when they remain unapparent. Sensing devices render
4
It is interesting to note that with regards to Coronavirus data there is, at least in a certain sense, absolutely transparency.
I, as a foreigner stuck in Canada, can check a miniprogram on Wechat and see how many people each day have been
infected in my local neighbourhood in Shanghai.
5
In Canada, health officials spoke proudly of their success in ‘sensitive surveillance’ (Alam 2020).
STUDIA NEOPHILOLOGICA
11
perceptible that which is hidden in the present so that future outbreaks can be kept under
control (for example, FN Facial recognition masks).
The Chinese city of the 2020s has been subsumed in a machinic sensibility.
Nonetheless zones and practices of concealment remain. One important example lies in
the fact that cash, while massively marginalised, has not been eliminated. Instead, it
continues to play a crucial role. After the policy of ‘real name registration’, access to the
all-pervasive machinic environment in China requires a form of ID and a Chinese bank
account. Visitors have no way in. Even opening a Wechat account outside the country can
be difficult. Chenxin Jiang (2019), returning to capital after her last visit in 2016, found that
‘Beijing felt like a different city from the one I knew: in the two years since I’d left, the
whole city had switched over to mobile payments on China-specific platforms to which I,
a foreigner, had no access’. Outsiders have no choice but to operate in a less convenient
and efficient parallel universe. Intriguingly, then, the persistence of cash is closely tied to
the increasingly fraught issue of Chinese cosmopolitanism.
A still more subtle realm through which the hidden is made manifest is through what
political theorist James Scott (2014) has called ‘infrapolitics’. Scott (2014: 21) writes that
‘infrapolitics’ names that which ‘is practiced outside the visible spectrum of what usually
passes for political activity’. He explains: ‘[b]y infrapolitics I have in mind such acts as
foot-dragging, poaching, pilfering, dissimulation, sabotage, desertion, absenteeism,
squatting, and flight’. These unseen practices of the everyday have long been part of
the political culture in China. Citing Colin Ward, Scott (2014: xxi) notes that anarchist
informality:
[. . .] far from being a speculative vision of a future society, is a description of a mode of human
experience of everyday life, which operates side-by-side with, and in spite of, the dominant
authoritarian trends of our society.
China does not have a single nationwide health registration system. Rather, social tech
nology is made up of a local patchwork. In many cities there was a kind of infrapolitical
resistance to the codes from the start. Scanning a QR code wherever you went was ‘tai
mafan’
(太麻煩), too much trouble. The codes slowed down subways and made entrances
inconvenient. Older people without the latest smart phone found them confusing and
difficult to use, and some younger people were deliberately choosing to go to places that
did not require a code. In addition, as Cohen and Gkristi (2020) report, the ‘labor-intensive
network of checkpoints associated with the system’ was extremely expensive. By the end
of April 2020 in most places in Shanghai people had simply stopped checking the code.
Even ‘Hangzhou, a health code pioneer and enthusiastic adopter, has also largely aban
doned checks’ (Cohen & Gkristi 2020). The health code surveillance system, Cohen and
Gkristi (2020) conclude, ‘seems to fade quickly when the virus is under control’. It exists as
an on and off system that seems to come and go with the waves of the disease.
The political power and types of authorities that govern the city’s machinic sensation is
still in flux. We do not know what the Sentient City can do. The new modes of discovery,
modelling, resilience and urban management that it makes possible, as well as the kinds
of urban life it challenges and disallows are only now, slowly, coming into focus. This essay
argues that to explore these fully, at least within the Chinese context, requires a shift in
discourse. Rather than positing a ‘capitalist’ surveillance that is resisted by the private
12
A. GREENSPAN
rights of the citizen of a democratic state, it suggests we might turn instead to an
alternative cosmo-ontology, which is attuned to the intermingling tensions between
the visible and the invisible, the seen and the unseen, the transparent and opaque.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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