Today I’m going to digress a bit from discussing the local coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) crisis to explore an interesting bit of data that has emerged from China. It seems that China, the most smartphone-dependent country in the world (there are 1.6 billion registered mobile accounts for an adult population of 1.1 billion people), has seen 21 million mobile accounts vanish in the past three months.

Twenty-one million accounts is just 1.3 percent of 1.6 billion, but to understand why the figure is nevertheless significant, one has to understand how embedded mobile communications are in everyday Chinese life. Modern China is one of the most digitally-connected societies on Earth; there is almost literally an app for everything, and for an increasing number of activities — getting a bank account, accessing services at certain government offices, applying for (or keeping) a job, and so on — having and using the appropriate app is a requirement.