Bounties, informant hotlines, barricaded doors and a lot of harassment: China authorities are doing everything to hunt those from Wuhan. In the process they risk eroding trust, establishing new stigmas and scattering scared carriers of the coronavirus. nytimes.com/2020/02/03/bus…
Propaganda portrays China's surveillance state as closing in on omniscience, a responsive machine oiled w/ big data that knows all. The reality is far from it. China's response to the virus, a mass mobilization tapping grassroots networks looks more akin to the Mao era.
Authorities found Harmo Tang 5 days after he returned from Wuhan. They registered his details, which then leaked online. Now he fields four calls a day from different paranoid officials. His apartment is blocked by police tape and a sign with a hotline to report him if he leaves. 
Said Harmo: “In reality there’s not much empathy,” from officials. “It’s not a caring tone they’re using. It’s a warning tone. I don’t feel very comfortable about it.” The paper hung by his door has an informant hotline, which broadly have become more common in Xi Jinping's China
Another Wuhan man rented a car to try to drive his family south from Beijing. He set up a self quarantine in Nanjing, but was sent to a hotel with all others from Wuhan (sick or not). Now he spends his days plugging holes in the drafty room he fears will infect his family.
“They’re only working to separate Wuhan people from Nanjing people...They don’t care at all if Wuhan people infect each other," he said. The hotel is low enough quality there are drafts coming under the walls. Here he used tissue to plug a hole.
Doors have also been barricaded by zealous officials. Here's a collection of shots from the Chinese internet. In one case a family relied on neighbors to lower food from balconies above after they were closed in. haokan.baidu.com/v?vid=17889132…
Also fever screening checkpoints are now everywhere. Here’s me going through one in Guangzhou. The issue is the thermometers often aren’t held close enough or simply don’t function. Most people turn up with corpse-level temperatures in the 34 range (93 degrees Fahrenheit)
Here’s me getting the thermometer gun and the edict mandating the checks. We started asking the volunteers whether they’d ever measured someone with a fever in the week they’d been doing it. They mostly laughed and shook their head.
These campaigns give the sense that things are being done. Everywhere every official is trying to show their worth. In many villages people have gone over the top. Some have begun offering bounties for people who report those from Wuhan.
Overzealous village officials blocked Jia Yuting from attending her grandfather's funeral, even though she had returned from Wuhan three weeks prior. Her info also leaked. “Why did you come back Wuhan? You should have stayed there. You Wuhan dog!” said one abusive caller.
What's fascinating is how this compares to SARS. One paper on the response then says: "Driven by political zeal, they sealed off villages, apartment complexes, and university campuses, quarantined tens of thousands of people, and set up checkpoints to take temperatures...."
"...By May 7, 18,000 people had been quarantined in Beijing... In the countryside, virtually every village was on SARS alert, with roadside booths installed to examine all." Sounds familiar. So much has changed since the 2003 SARS outbreak in China, and so much hasn't.
