That’s scary enough to begin with when observed from a western perspective. But many residents of rural portions of China recently learned the hard way that the Chinese Communist Party is using the tracker for a lot more than health reasons. There was recently a banking scandal involving several smaller, rural banks, where a banking executive was accused of stealing large sums of money from the banks’ coffers and going on the run. When residents learned of this, many attempted to travel to towns where the banks had physical branches to withdraw their money while they could. But upon arriving, most of them found that their health tracker codes had mysteriously turned red despite having negative COVID tests and the towns not being listed as infection hotspots. They were locked out of the banks, their hotels, and other resources.