Remember all those videos early on out of China, with people just walking down the street and falling over dead from Covid? Yea, malice alright.
I recall there was a big thing back then where a bunch of Chinese citizens who were angry because the real estate market in China is a total fraud, and...it is apparently the only thing people are allowed to invest money in.
So when the market was completely tanking, there were people who were planning to go to the big cities to protest because their life savings were gone, and...the night before they were supposed to leave to travel to the city in their region, their QR codes that allowed them to travel during the COVID crisis turned from green to red, which means they were not allowed to leave their domicile.
The CCP was using COVID to keep dissidents from traveling to protest.