Social Credit System

Not to be confused with social credit, an interdisciplinary and distributive philosophy, or Zhima Credit, a private financial credit-scoring and loyalty program by Ant Group.

Social Credit System
Simplified Chinese社会信用体系
Traditional Chinese社會信用體系
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu Pinyinshèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì
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The Social Credit System (Chinese: 社会信用体系; pinyin: shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì) is a national credit rating and blacklist being developed by the government of China.[1] The social credit initiative calls for the establishment of a record system so that businesses, individuals and government institutions can be tracked and evaluated for trustworthiness.[2][3] There are multiple forms of the social credit system being experimented with,[4][5] while the national regulatory method is based on whitelisting (termed redlisting in China) and blacklisting.[6][7][8] There is no universal social credit score or system.

The origin of the concept can be traced back to the 1980s when the Chinese government attempted to develop a personal banking and financial credit rating system, especially for rural individuals and small businesses who lacked documented records.[9] The program first emerged in the early 2000s, inspired by the credit scoring systems in other countries.[1] The program initiated regional trials in 2009, before launching a national pilot with eight credit scoring firms in 2014.[10][7]

The Social Credit System is an extension to the existing legal and financial credit rating system in China.[11] Managed by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the People's Bank of China (PBOC) and the Supreme People's Court (SPC),[12] the system was intended to standardize the credit rating function and perform financial and social assessment for businesses, government institutions, individuals and non-government organizations.[13][14][15] The Chinese government's stated aim is to enhance trust in society with the system and regulate businesses in areas such as food safety, intellectual property, and financial fraud.[11][9][16]

There is a common misconception that China operates a nationwide "social credit score" system that assigns individuals a score based on their behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low. However, this is not true. Western media reports have sometimes exaggerated or inaccurately described this concept.[17][18] According to the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a Berlin-based think tank, the social credit system does not continuously monitor or evaluate individual behavior. Punishments are only for violations of laws and regulations. A quantifying score does not exist.[19]

  1. ^ a b "China's social credit score – untangling myth from reality | Merics". merics.org. 11 February 2022. Retrieved 10 August 2022.
  2. ^ Stevenson, Alexandra; Mozur, Paul (22 September 2019). "China Scores Businesses, and Low Grades Could Be a Trade-War Weapon". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
  3. ^ Cheng, Evelyn (4 September 2019). "China is building a 'comprehensive system' for tracking companies' activities, report says". CNBC. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
  4. ^ Ahmed, Shazeda (1 May 2019). "The Messy Truth About Social Credit". logic magazine.
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference Liu-2019 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Yang, Zeyi (22 November 2022). "China just announced a new social credit law. Here's what it means". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  7. ^ a b Hornby, Lucy. "China changes tack on 'social credit' scheme plan". Financial Times. 5 July 2017. Retrieved 14 July 2017.
  8. ^ Matsakis, Louise (29 July 2019). "How the West Got China's Social Credit System Wrong". Wired. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
  9. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference merics was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ Zhong, Yuhao (Summer 2019). "Rethinking the Social Credit System: A Long Road to Establishing Trust in Chinese Society" (PDF). Symposium on Applications of Contextual Integrity: 28–29 – via Privaci.info.
  11. ^ a b "China's Social Credit System: Speculation vs. Reality". The Diplomat. Archived from the original on 30 March 2021.
  12. ^ "What is China's social credit system and why is it controversial?". South China Morning Post. 9 August 2020. Retrieved 8 December 2020.
  13. ^ 国务院关于印发社会信用体系建设规划纲要（2014—2020年）的通知. Central Government of China (in Chinese (China)). Retrieved 10 November 2019.
  14. ^ Meissner, Mirjam (24 May 2017). "China's Social Credit System: A big-data enabled approach to market regulation with broad implications for doing business in China" (PDF). www.merics.org. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 March 2018. Retrieved 11 July 2017.
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference merics_2103 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ Botsman, Rachel (2017). Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart. London, UK: Portfolio Penguin.
  17. ^ Cite error: The named reference meme was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  18. ^ Cite error: The named reference Yu-2023 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  19. ^ "China's social credit score – untangling myth from reality | Merics". merics.org. 11 February 2022. Retrieved 6 July 2024. The biggest disconnect is around the notion of scores. Some commentators seem to imagine that a magic algorithm draws from AI cameras and internet surveillance all over the country to calculate a score that determines everyone's place in society. In reality, the SoCS is not the techno-dystopian nightmare we fear: it is lowly digitalized, highly fragmented, and primarily focuses on businesses. Most importantly, such a score simply does not exist.