Thread by @davidfickling

People like to describe China's social credit system as an Orwellian new tool of centralized control.

In truth, it's much more like the chaotic, nonsensical oppression of a Franz Kafka story (thread):
bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/ar…

There's been a lot of ink spilled about the social credit system since it was first mooted in 2014, and IMO a lot of it is off the mark.

That's not because I don't think China is an oppressive authoritarian society (it is!) but because social credit doesn't really change that.

The basic idea of social credit is that each Chinese citizen gets something like the personal credit rating you would get from Experian. But then you add or subtract points for "social" behaviour that's not clearly relevant to your creditworthiness.

That could be penalties for parking violations or littering and failed court appearances; bonuses for associating with a high-credit-score group of friends; and perhaps other criteria, of which the most oft-speculated is "saying bad things about the government on WeChat".

A few important things here:

1. To my knowledge, the only non-credit behaviour that currently goes into these databases is the littering-and-parking fines stuff. "Expression of political rights" could in theory be added (this is China, after all) but that's not happening yet.

2. There's about 50 different social credit platforms, not one unified one. The ones operated by companies like Alibaba/Ant's Alipay and Tencent seem similar to commercial western personal credit rating systems, are quite well-known, and seem reasonably popular.

3. Then there's about 40 pilot projects operated by local governments, which are what people outside China worry most about but which are often barely known in China.

There was a great Bloomberg News piece this week looking at one of these model programs in Suzhou. It's a mess.

Despite the creepy Black Mirror-ish name (when translated into English) of "Osmanthus", most people seem to hardly know it's operating.

It seems to be racked with bureaucratic infighting, inefficiency, and caprice.
bloomberg.com/news/features/…

Indeed, the thing residents interviewed claim to be most worried about seems to be the chance that it ends up being used in a sort of capricious or unpredictable way -- not the risk that the government will use it as a fresh tool of oppression.

One explanation for that is that they're afraid to voice their real concerns in public because that will get them in trouble.

In general I think that's a good precaution to take to almost all public-opinion research relating to China. But in this case I think it's not that.

IMO they sound relaxed not because they're scared of criticising social credit, but because they don't think it will change very much.

China is already a very oppressive authoritarian state and social credit doesn't really change that!

In some western writings about social credit you almost sense that people think China would be Canada if social credit didn't exist.

This one rather ineffectual program becomes a sort of synecdoche for China's entire surveillance state.

Needless to say, if Beijing abolished social credit tomorrow, Chinese citizens would still have their ID cards checked going down the street, get their luggage scanned going on the metro, and have their social media posts, payments and movements watched by the government.

Beijing didn't need social credit to turn Xinjiang into a vast outdoor prison: nytimes.com/interactive/20…

Now of course it's possible that the tools of social credit -- lower-rate loans, better travel tickets, etc. -- could be used to enhance the oppression that already exists. But next to being imprisoned, having your organs harvested, and being executed this is not that scary.

I think it's actually worth taking Beijing's word, to some extent, about what social credit is about.

Many of the greatest frustrations of daily life in China seem to relate to its chaotic, corrupt or nonsensical nature.

The CCP has a self-interested reason to alleviate that stuff because popular frustration with the opaque, capricious power permeating Chinese society could fuel challenges to its own authority.

That is explicitly the purpose of social credit, per its guideline documents: Increading the level of trust and sincerity in society by making sure that malefactors can't get away with stuff by the usual guanxi etc

I'm quite sure that a very attractive side-effect of this, in Beijing's eyes, is that it could concentrate still more power in the CCP's hands, relative to a status quo where it's oddly distributed through provincial and municipal government etc

But I think it's worth revognizing things as they are. The Black Mirror dystopia where Chinese people are ruled by their social credit score is also science fiction for the CCP, and their ongoing failure to stamp out corruption suggests to me that this will remain the case.

Of course a Kafkaesque society can still be very bad! But a society where you can end up executed for reasons you barely understand, as in The Trial, IMO more closely resembles contemporary Chinese life than the world of 1984 does. (ends)

PS: Read this thread by @muyixiao for an example of the sort of alarming 360-degree surveillance becoming routine in China.

It's bizarre to me that social credit, rather than this sort of thing, seems to get the lion's share of attention outside China:

https://twitter.com/muyixiao/status/1142165722229026818?s=19