When COVID-19 first broke out in the Chinese state of Wuhan, Xi Jinping’s government — already equipped with advanced surveillance infrastructure — responded in a rather unsurprising way: with more surveillance. Chinese authorities harnessed big data to deploy facial recognition systems that detect high temperatures in crowds, track population movement using smartphone data, and create new artificial intelligence models for identifying people wearing masks. The government has encouraged citizens to monitor neighbors and report those suspected of carrying the virus.

Just as unsurprisingly, Western governments and their allies — quick to resurrect Cold War conflicts — took Beijing’s aggressive response as an opportunity to score points against the Chinese state. Digital privacy pundits warned that Xi was using the pandemic to bolster his spying apparatus and slammed the Chinese government for operating nothing less than a dystopian surveillance state. In truth, with China’s repression of Xinjiang’s Uyghur population, the Chinese internet’s tireless censorship program, and the recently deployed “social credit system,” much of this criticism is well warranted.

But for now, China’s surveillance measures seem to have worked. The outbreak in Wuhan appears largely under control, with the government reporting no new local cases. And while the Chinese government has been roundly condemned for cracking down on COVID-19 whistleblowers, its use of big data to find and quarantine infected people has since been praised as a model for the rest of the world.