What impact does the Social Credit System have on person-person relations in China?
We conducted interviews with residents from twenty different Chinese cities and a national survey to find out
One question researchers still know very little about concerning people’s lived experience under the Social Credit System (SCS) in China is how being blacklisted actually impacts the quality of person-to-person relationships.
Aside from formal state restrictions like being barred from flying or purchasing luxury goods and items, blacklisting also results in the naming and shaming of ‘untrustworthy’ individuals and businesses. In a recent open access paper published by the Journal of Contemporary China my colleague Chuncheng Liu and I provide some preliminary insight on this complicated issue.
When I began researching the SCS four years ago as a doctoral student, popular foreign media depictions were bleak and overly sensationalised. Reporting on the ground in China painted a simplistic picture of what the project intended to achieve and generally overstated levels of development and implementation.
And while the SCSP was framed as monolithic, citizens were represented through a crude binary, portrayed either as ‘the oppressed dissident’ or ‘blindly obedient’. These stories came soaked in cultural assumptions fuelled by ideas, events, and histories familiar to Western audiences, but very different from those circulating in China.
Ultimately, these dominant media narratives failed to adequately contextualise the project against long running political and social trends in China, with the result being a projection of foreign values and assumptions that continues to hamper general understandings of the SCS.
Despite the research community working methodically to dispel many of these misunderstandings, this initial flurry of media attention has decisively shaped mainstream opinion about the SCS abroad of China.
So often have the terms ‘Orwellian’, ‘Black Mirror’, or ‘Nineteen eighty-four’ featured in conversations I’ve had with people about my research that the ceaseless references to these works of fiction have become their own point of inquiry.
While undoubtedly there are aspects of the SCS that raise serious and legitimate concerns concerning government accountability, the scope of legal authority, and threats to individual rights, squeezing complex phenomena through a ‘black and white’ or a ‘good vs bad’ narrative structure encourages biased interpretations and division over enquiry, intrigue or negotiation.
The hottening geopolitical climate we are met with today ought not negate efforts to reach across cultural and linguistic boundaries to give context and voice to the people directly affected. It is the role of academics to aid in this process, and it is this call that I try my best to answer in the work I do as a scholar in the field.
In this post I wanted to dispel some of the most common misconceptions about the SCS and introduce our new findings to a broader audience outside the ivory tower of academia.
What is the Social Credit System? (Or Social Credit System’s’)
In the West, sensationalised media depictions portray the SCS as a techno-dystopian authoritarian system of social control, one that is seemingly omnipresent, seamless in operation, and coherent in logic. Within China however, debate concerning what the SCS is, what it is not, and what it should or should not do, is still very much ongoing.
Much of the existing Western media in this area commits a major fault in the portrayal of the SCS as a singular, homogenous, linked information system. This depiction greatly overestimates the level of integration between the many different systems currently being constructed and operationalised in China by the national, provincial and even municipal governments.
There is presently no single ‘Social Credit System’, rather, there are hundreds of SCSs that operate under similar logics. Under guidance from the Chinese State Council, and with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and People’s Bank of China (PBoC) leading in design, SCS construction is taking place across a plethora of areas.
Between 2014–2020 these included, but were not limited to, government procurement, finance, taxation, pricing, traffic and transportation, e-commerce, education and scientific research, environmental protection and energy saving, social organisations, internet applications and services, and finally, ‘natural persons’ (ziran ren 自然人).
Only recently have scholars attempted to conceptualise and explain how the SCS actually operates as an ‘ecosystem’ or ‘system of systems’. Following the lead of Xin Dai, I opt for the title ‘Social Credit System Project’ (hereafter the ‘SCSP’) to refer to the overarching framework or guiding ethos behind the design and rollout of these respective SCSs.
The word ‘project’ denotes something under construction. Subsequently, the SCSP ought to be appraised less as a monumental, integrated technical system and more as a policy framework that mobilises institutions to collect and share data, collaborate to punish or reward actors based on their ‘trustworthiness’ and legal abidance, and apply scoring and rating-based mechanisms to resolve regulatory issues within their respective jurisdictions.
One of the most harmful reporting errors has been the assumption that the main target of the SCSP is the individual citizen, and that under the SCSP each citizen in China is delegated a score that determines the scope of their opportunities in society. This belief has been proven false and misleading by multiple scholars (eg. Creemers, 2018; Engelmann et al., 2021; Brussee, 2022).
No integrated credit score for individuals or businesses presently exists at the central governmental level. Moreover businesses, and not individuals, are the main targets of the project.
Researchers from the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) China Monitor examined mentions of target groups across national and provincial SCSP documents sourced from the State Council and Credit China Platform (xinyong zhongguo 信用中国网站) the national government website for the SCSP) between 2003 and 2020, finding that businesses are by far the most mentioned target group of the SCSP (73.3%), over five times more than government entities (13.3%), individuals (10.3%) or social organisations (3.3%).
Another myth concerns itself with the scope of technologies deployed as part of the project, in particular video surveillance, facial recognition, and AI decision making in scoring, which is often exaggerated. For the most part, the SCSP remains highly fragmented, operating through low-tech data collection and input methods dependent on human investigations, reports, and decisions.
Decisions are made on the basis of past conduct, not some kind of algorithmically facilitated prediction of future behaviour. In November 2021 China joined the 192 other members of the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) in pledging to ban the use of AI in social scoring systems. These multilateral pledges have also been reflected in domestic legislation. Article 41 of the Administrative Penalties Law revised in January 2021 insists that digitally collected evidence requires human evaluation. Administrative penalties are the primary way punishments are sanctioned under the SCSP, indicating that automation likely remains off the near-term agenda.
A final tendency has been the portrayal of the SCSP as far removed from social and technical realities in Western liberal democracies. Yet aspects of the SCSP merely accentuate, rather than diverge from, forms of reputation-based decision making within these contexts.
In our society of strangers, scores and ratings increasingly function as ‘tokens of trust’ — they come to speak on our behalf when others are deciding whether or not to interact with us. We use scores and ratings to evaluate our Uber driver, decide what restaurant to dine at, or to express our disapproval following a lousy nights accomodation.
The search for the lauded five star rating or ‘A’ class label directs consumers to the best services, rewards the best products, and reduces the chance we may encounter an unpleasant experience.
Yet in our hurried pursuit of what’s ‘optimal’, we often pay little attention to the context behind the assignment of the rating. Was it justly earned because of poor service? Or did an unruly patron with a grudge against the establishment in question recruit some friends to dish out a virtual 1/5 under false pretences?
Such nuances are obscured under the seeming neatness of these proliferating systems of reputation-based decision making with which the people of the world are increasingly required to engage. The SCSP is the extension of this logic to a broader array of life domains and thus it amplifies the concomitant risks.
The system Chuncheng and I explore in our recent paper is the nation-wide Blacklist System which is currently the most consequential SCS for individuals. Through interviews with residents from twenty Chinese cities and a national survey, we examine how people in China interpret the premises of this system and engage with those dubbed ‘untrustworthy’.
In future Medium articles, I will explain the function of additional systems that fall under the scope of the SCSP.
This is an Open Access article, free to share and download:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/10670564.2022.2128638
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Alexander Trauth-Goik is a political science and sociology postdoctoral researcher at the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna. His current research examines the ways in which people interpret and engage with new regimes of classification and evaluation enabled by the operationalisation of big data in governance, with a focus on the overlap and tension between different digital governance systems in China.
