Surveillance Path Dependence: Technological and Institutional Lock-In of Digital Surveillance Infrastructures in China

Digital surveillance infrastructures are widely critiqued for their use-side problems of access, privacy, and discrimination, but meaningful intervention requires understanding how these infrastructures are developed and stabilized in the first place. This paper examines China’s health code systems (HCSs) as a revelatory case of path dependence in the development of digital surveillance infrastructures. Drawing on news, first-hand interviews, and fieldwork, we trace how local governments chose to embed contact-tracing systems within the pre-existing digital ecosystems of Alipay and WeChat, primarily at the local level. Such choices persisted despite the central government’s openly cautious stance toward private tech giants and its subsequent attempts to develop independent alternatives. We describe this trajectory as surveillance path dependence, in which the convergence of pre-existing technological foundations, tight temporal pressure, and institutional incentives within a fragmented authoritarian institutional context locked new applications into established digital surveillance paths. This study suggests that mitigating the adverse societal impacts of large-scale digital surveillance requires intervening directly in the foundational design and institutional deployment of digital ecosystems rather than at the level of use-side effects.