Abstract
In China's responses to COVID-19 pandemic, digital measures such as Health Code and Itinerary Card are developed and adopted for mobility regulation. This study analyzes the Chinese state capabilities in implementing the aforementioned measures to evaluate if the digital technologies have enhanced the authoritarian state's power. The data include news from WeChat public accounts, and comments from Zhihu, Backbackers, and other question-and-answer websites. In addition, this study interviews peoples with cross-province travel experiences during the pandemic, including managers of human resource department in Chinese enterprises, employees of Taiwanese and Chinese enterprises, and Chinese university students. This study finds that the existence of locally-varied and multiple health codes is a result of fragmented bureaucracy in which cross-regional and cross-departmental coordination for information integration is still a major issue. In addition, this study finds that the effectiveness of Health Code and Itinerary Card as a tracking and surveillance tool is embedded upon mobile technology infrastructure. Based on these two findings, this study notes the limitation of Health Code and Itinerary Card in their enhancement of authoritarian state's capacities in national tracking and surveillance.