China's brave new world

China’s love of technology has helped it through the pandemic and put at the forefront of a reinvigorated digital revolution.

Mobile payment

When Peggy Liu went to see her brother’s newborn at a Shanghai hospital recently she had to take her phone. Not to make calls or take pictures, but so that staff could ensure she was a low risk for Covid-19.

“The first thing the hospital did – after making sure I had a mask and taking my temperature – was to look at my health code on my phone,” she tells mega over video call. “Contact tracing is what is really helping the Asian countries feel safe.”

Run by Alibaba, WeChat and Baidu, the code system gives users a traffic light colour based on their health data and travel history. It is also used to track down people who might have come into contact with an infected individual. The app is now in use across hundreds of cities across China, determining whether people can go to work, use public transport and more.

The amount of available data is huge, including GPS location history, medical records, travel bookings, visitor logs, financial transactions (via credit cards or mobiles) and CCTV camera footage. The spectrum will only grow as the spread of 5G networks enables the development of a huge Internet of Things, connecting everything from parking spaces to fridges to the digital world.

China is well-placed to be at the forefront of this revolution. For one thing, its political and social systems mean there are fewer obstacles to the use of personal data compared to the US and Europe where privacy concerns are paramount among both consumers and regulators.

Furthermore, its population has been quicker to embrace technology in all its forms than many other nations. Even before the lockdown, e-commerce represented more than half of total retail sales in China, compared with just over 10 per cent in the US. Indeed, China is said to be “a good four or five years” ahead of where the West is in terms of logistics and digital commerce and retail. That progress includes contactless payments – a key factor in today’s germophobic world. Non-bank online payment platforms in China processed a whopping RMB250 trillion (USD35 trillion) of transactions in 2019, according to official data.

“In China everything is mobile pay – you can leave the house without a wallet, credit card or cash,” says Liu. “If you don’t have to touch cash, there is one less way to get sick.”

Mobile payment infograrphic

The pandemic has also spurred on the use of digital and robotic technology in other areas.

“The move towards remote diagnostics and med tech has been accelerated. Using drones and electric self-driving vehicles has been accelerated too – there are self driving vehicles now doing food deliveries, street cleaning, medical deliveries,” Liu notes.

As the first country hit by the pandemic, China was also the first to switch to home working and home learning. An estimated 200 million Chinese were working remotely at the peak of the lockdown, including Liu.

Microsoft’s Teams saw a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes on 31 March 2020, while Google’s video conferencing product, Meet, has logged more than 2 million new users connecting every day in the first week of April 2020.

Even when the lockdowns are fully lifted around the world, Liu expects that both businesses and employees will embrace more flexible working practices than pre-pandemic: “Companies will radically change how they work”.

In this respect, China may need to play catch up – pre-pandemic only half of its businesses had a flexible working policy, compared to a global average of 62 per cent and to 69 per cent in the US. However, its openness to tech puts China in a strong position to embrace a much more sophisticated online working experience, including virtual and augmented reality.

“Everything that was changing has just accelerated. All systems in the world have to be rearranged around the fact that change is the only constant,” Liu says.