Secretary for Food and Health Sophia Chan announced in high profile that if the epidemic continues to stabilize, the current social distancing measures will be relaxed on the seventh day of the Chinese New Year. The intent is to foster a positive atmosphere for the holiday season and relieve the public’s grievances over the severe restrictions imposed over the past two months. However, the conditions for relaxation proposed by the government not only failed to alleviate public discontent but instead attracted more anger and suspicion. From the perspective of public relations, the SAR government has once again made a rudimentary mistake, which is even more worrying to the author, as the government has once again demonstrated to the public its political intention to intensify its surveillance of the public.

First of all, the health chief boasted about the mandatory lockdown of buildings or streets in the past half month, saying that the measures were effective in suppressing the epidemic. However, the facts tell us that after mobilizing thousands or even tens of thousands of public servants and spending countless resources, only 20 confirmed cases of infection could be identified among 20,000 plus people in the compulsory testing, representing a positive rate of 0.08%. How can the health minister claim the success of this costly measure when the figure is not even as high as the average infection rate of the entire population of Hong Kong?

If we really want to look at the effectiveness of the mandatory testing enforced during the district lockdowns, we should compare it to other mandatory testing measures. Currently, if a confirmed case of infection is found in a building, or if two cases are found in an office, or if the sewage sample of a building continues to test positive for the novel coronavirus, the people in that building or office will be required to undergo compulsory virus testing. In order to determine which testing method is more effective, the government should provide the number of people tested under these mandatory orders and the number of infected cases found among them, and see how the ratio compares to the mandatory testing in the district lockdowns.

It is important to understand that the ambush-style lockdowns in various parts of the community are a direct infringement of freedom. The government must demonstrate sufficient justification before it can use these extreme measures in a reasonable manner, otherwise, it would be the act of an authoritarian government. Yet, the government has not provided any objective criteria for the district closures, and it has also ended up empty-handed in multiple lockdown operations. It is hard not to suspect that the SAR government is only using the anti-epidemic measures as a set of experiments to introduce the mainland’s autocratic governance to the city.

In addition to the closing of designated areas for testing, requiring restaurants to use the “LeaveHomeSafe” app as a prerequisite for the resumption of evening dine-in service is also clear evidence of the government’s attempt to strengthen its surveillance of the public. Although the government has repeatedly stressed that the app is not a means of monitoring people’s movements, when there is much evidence to support that the health code system in the mainland has become a means of surveillance, how can the SAR government, whose credibility has reached rock bottom, not make people suspect that what it is doing is following the steps of the mainland and accelerating the erosion of “one country, two systems”?

Admittedly, there has been no large-scale outbreak among restaurant customers in the latest wave of the epidemic, and small outbreaks within eateries have largely been limited to their staff, so the relaxation of dine-in hours and an increase in the maximum number of people allowed at each table would not lead to a significant rebound in the epidemic. In this context, there is simply no urgent need for restaurants to record all customer information, and there is no policy imperative to mandate the use of the “LeaveHomeSafe” app. However, the fact that the responsible person of the restaurant must bear legal responsibility for this provision, or even incur business suspension, gives the enforcement agency the opportunity to clamp down on targeted premises. As one might expect, we will see the downside of this measure before we see any benefit.

In the year of the epidemic, the SAR government has been taking advantage of the crisis to implement measures to deprive people of their freedom and step up social surveillance. These measures generally do not conform to any policy logic, with unclear objectives and no way to evaluate their effectiveness. It is a covert effort to gradually introduce the mainland’s methods of monitoring the public into Hong Kong. It is utterly shameless to force the public to accept the tightening of social control by threatening the economy and people’s livelihood, so that the public will unknowingly descend into white terror. When the epidemic is over, the SAR government will surely pay a heavy political price for its evil deeds today.

(Chung Shing-cheung, independent writer)

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