China’s unprecedented measures to mobilize its diverse surveillanceapparatus played a key part in the country’s successful containment of the ongoingcoronavirus pandemic. Critics worldwide believe these invasive technologies, in thehands of an authoritarian regime, couldtrample the right to privacy and curbfundamental civil and human rights. However, there is little domestic public resis-tance in China about technology-related privacy risks during the pandemic. Drawingon academic research and a semantic network analysis of media frames, we explorethe contextual political and cultural belief systems that determine public supportfor authorities’ ever-expanding access to personal data. We interrogate thelonger-term trajectoriesdincluding the guardian model of governance, sociotech-nical imagination of technology, and communitarian valuesdby which the under-standing of technology and privacy in times of crisis has been shaped. China’sactions shed light on the general acceptance of the handover of personal datafor anti-epidemic purposes in East Asian societies like South Korea and Singapore.