📡 Data & IoT

Health Code (健康码) — Hangzhou's Pandemic Status QR

In February 2020, Hangzhou's Yuhang district built a QR pass with Alibaba Cloud, DingTalk and Alipay; the city launched a citywide, three-colour (green/yellow/red) health code on 11 February that gated entry to transit, offices and shops. Beijing had a national version built on the same template within days.

Completed 📅 2020–2022 ◆ Source-checked

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below — how this works · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-03

📡 Data & IoT Digital government Health & care Safety & security

📊 Impact

Within 39 days of Hangzhou's launch, all 31 of China's provincial-level administrations had adopted health-code systems built on its template.

🎓 Lesson

Built in days for a pandemic, the same city health commission tried to turn it into a permanent 0-100 lifestyle score in May 2020 — a public backlash forced an immediate retreat, but the app survived, rebuilt in 2023 as a medical-services portal after colour checks ended.

Evidence🔬 Peer-reviewed

Scale🏙️ City-wide

📖 Terms in this entry: ANPR (automatic number-plate recognition) · CBTC (communications-based train control) · Civic participation platform

Sources

↗ How Alibaba built China's 'health code' system (TechNode)Yuhang district task force with Ali Cloud/DingTalk/Alipay; colour-status meanings (green = travel freely, yellow = 1-week self-quarantine, red = 2-week home isolation).

↗ 杭州网 (Hangzhou News Center)Yuhang pass precursor 10 Feb; citywide three-colour Hangzhou health code launched 11 Feb with 10 million first-day visits; provincewide 16 Feb; national version the same week.

↗ Decoding China's COVID-19 Health Code Apps: The Legal Challenges (peer-reviewed)Task force formed 6 Feb 2020, app launched 11 Feb; all 31 provincial governments adopted variants within 39 days.

↗ City's Plan for Permanent 'Health Codes' Sparks Online Backlash (Sixth Tone)May 2020: Hangzhou Health Commission proposed a permanent 0-100 lifestyle score; 86% of a Weibo poll opposed it.

↗ Chinese City Faces Backlash Over Proposal to Make Health Tracking App Permanent (RADII)Four days after the proposal, Hangzhou officials walked it back, calling the scored code conceptual only.

↗ 杭州政协网 (Hangzhou CPPCC)January 2023: the health-code mini-program was rebuilt into a medical-services platform after nationwide colour-code venue checks ended in December 2022.

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

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Compare this project

🇸🇬 TraceTogether & SafeEntry Digital Contact Tracing · Singapore Both are pandemic-era status apps now completed: Hangzhou's code (2020) became China's template; TraceTogether was retired in 2023. 🇨🇳 Guali Qicai Future Community (Xiaoshan District) · Hangzhou Another verified project from Hangzhou. 🇨🇳 Hangzhou Data Open Platform · Hangzhou Another verified project from Hangzhou.

Explore the wider context

🗺️ Your City's Problem Map Is Really a Map of Who Complains 🪪 Digital government guide 🏙️ Hangzhou city profile 📡 Data & IoT projects

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Health Code (健康码) — Hangzhou's Pandemic Status QR” — Hangzhou, China. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/hangzhou-health-code/ (last verified 2026-08-03). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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