As early as this year, every Chinese citizen will start living in Big Brother—every one of their actions will be reflected in a new system called “social credit.” If they fight the authorities, run over a kitten or fail to look after their parents, they will never earn public trust and will be stripped of a whole range of rights. And if they are model citizens, they will enjoy Big Brother's bonuses. They will receive all sorts of goodies, bestowed by that very same system.
There has been a lot of talk on this subject lately, but… only in extremes. You will very often see the new Chinese social system described with a story like the one above, as a prelude to the coming to life of Orwell's fiction, worn thin by quotation (and by reissues, since it is out of copyright, though hardly by reading). Not long ago, in an interview for Digital Stories, Svetlin Nakov, the founder of SoftUni, also painted the frightening picture of a future coming out of China.
In other publications, meanwhile, you will come across descriptions of the system as a super-innovative solution that puts things “even more in order” in an already intricately structured Chinese society.
Anyone who thinks propaganda as a factor in communication is a thing of the past is, of course, very seriously mistaken. And when it comes to China's social credit system, the clash of propagandas is direct, brutal, and the nuances are very hard to find.
Where does the truth lie? Only the Chinese know. Or at least some of them.
The Chinese Trick
Anyone who has brushed up against this civilization knows one thing. It is hard to peer into its heart and its ways; it is fundamentally different from ours. And yet China's social credit system is such a curious and vast project that it is worth the effort to try to look behind the propaganda, however difficult it is to draw any objective conclusions at all.
The project appeared in 2014 as the “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System” (2014–2020). And ever since, Western media haven't stopped presenting it as Orwell's scenario come to life, in which technology is used to control every area of human life.
Be that as it may, 2020 came and went, and the system is far from those fears. By all appearances, things are considerably more modest for now, even boring. What exists are rather separate regional systems at various stages of experimentation. As is typical of this part of the East, things happen slowly, patiently, to the point of freezing solid by the units of measurement we are used to working with in our Western civilization.
Chinese Water Drop
It's curious that Bulgarian has so many idioms connected with this country, which has always been distant for us: geographically, culturally and linguistically.
One thing is clear: things there really do happen slowly. Not long ago, the plan of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was adopted, and in it “establishing rules for fairness in society,” in which the credit system plays a key role, was pushed back to 2025.
Clumsy, sluggish institutions that can't be bothered with bureaucracy? You don't say—we've never seen anything like that around here.
At the moment, the social credit system is a heterogeneous mix of ambitious national-level ideas and completely contradictory regional solutions pulling in different directions. In December 2020, the first draft of a law to regulate it was barely ready—and only for internal review at that.
The undertaking was also delayed by Covid—although China was among the least affected countries, its anti-pandemic measures were truly impressive. They allowed the country where the virus was first registered to remain almost untouched by it.
By all appearances, the project is for now focused far more on companies than on individuals. A recent large-scale study showed that 73.3 percent of the official documents related to the social system name companies as the target of the undertaking, and only 10.3 percent concern individuals.
Chinese Torture
Either way, in December 2020 more than 80 percent of the provinces and autonomous regions announced that their regional draft legislation on the credit system was ready. But that seems to have been a rather hollow statistic.
Many publications on the subject will paint you a clear picture of what the system looks like, but for the moment there simply isn't one. In the city of Rongcheng, for example, all citizens receive a starting 1,000 points. The authorities take something away for every violation—speeding or stealing electricity, say—and give you a bonus if you donate blood or take part in a charity campaign.
In other regions the points are 100. And the rules are very strictly fixed. With 90 points you can't buy a business-class seat on a plane or a train, and below 50 you won't be admitted to university. Below 10, a person can be sent to a correctional camp.
One of the experiments is in Suzhou, a “modest” little town of 10 million on the outskirts of Shanghai. The local social credit system is called Osmanthus, after a characteristic plant. Here, too, you start with 100 points, and data from 20 state institutions is collected to change them. In theory, a person can accumulate up to 200 points if they are a true straight-A student. Here everyone can check their rating through a special app. Western journalists ran their own experiment, asking a number of people to try it, and the record they found belonged to a lady with a whole 123 points.
It turns out that few people have scores below the starting value, either. And for almost everyone asked, the rating never budged—it stayed at 100, several years after the experiment began.
The Great Wall
In some cities you'll find a classification similar to the energy-efficiency labels on appliances in stores—from A+++ to D. If you're among the former, you'll not only rent a bicycle for next to nothing, you'll also find it easy to get a loan on great terms. And, of course, vice versa.
So could a large part of the project's purpose be to serve as a frightening mask? Something like the sign warning that 100 meters ahead there's a camera that will photograph you if you're speeding…
The big question, of course, is above all about the blacklist—how you end up on it and whether you can get off it. But here, too, regional differences rule—while some areas currently choose to put you on it if you've zoomed past the speed camera enough times, others won't do it for anything more “modest” than murder.
Chopsticks
But what happens if your rating collapses—is your life over? Liu Hu is a journalist popular in the West who writes about corruption and censorship in his homeland. And, as he himself claims, he had the bad luck to land in the “black” part of the social rating. He was banned from buying tickets for certain train lines, from acquiring property, from taking out loans. “They didn't tell me anything, nor did they send me an official document. And, most frightening of all, there was simply nothing I could do to change it. There's no one to complain to. You just suddenly become nobody.”
According to official data, in 2018 the Chinese were unable to buy 23 million plane or train tickets because of low social credit scores.
In one of the systems under discussion at the central level, the basis is again 1,000 points, also tied to letters like those on appliances. People with fewer than 600 fall into group D, where most likely they won't be able to find even a low-paid job. Banks, of course, won't lend to them, and they can't rent cars or even bicycles. As for the rest—whether associating with such a person will hurt your own rating too; whether they will be deprived of civil rights, such as voting, or “sent” somewhere to be “corrected”… naturally, there's no way to find sufficiently reliable information.
In some areas the systems run at full steam; in others they practically don't exist. And a national-level solution has yet to be created, if it ever gets that far.
Chinese Medicine
Meanwhile, catching on to the basic idea, many companies are creating their own rating systems. Take Sesame Credit, the financial arm of the popular company Alibaba. The financial institution admits that it rates its 400 million users on a huge number of parameters, such as whether they are parents or… how much time they waste playing video games.
Sesame places people on a scale between 350 and 950 points. Those above 600 are entitled to an unsecured loan, those above 650 can buy a car in installments without extra charges, and those above 700 have a much easier time traveling to Singapore and even to the Schengen Area.
Sesame Credit also grants access to its rating to other projects, such as the dating site Baihe. So on the Chinese Tinder you can see not only the underwear photos of the person you've set your eye on, but also their credit score.
Chinese Wisdom
According to quite a few sources, the central system will look more like a store loyalty program than a sinister state plan to create the ideal citizen.
It is clear that the ultimate goal is a single nationwide system and database in which every Chinese citizen and every company has a unique number and rating. It can be used by employers, the Chinese authorities and lending organizations. Its main stated purpose is fighting fraud and financial schemes.
If we are to believe the descriptions, the system has its roots in… the fourth century. Back then Shang Yang, governor of the Shang region, became known as a great reformer because he imposed changes that helped strengthen the unified state. Something quite valuable, given China's particularities. He divided people into groups of five to ten families who were to live together, in constant contact, and report if anything was not as it should be with any member of the “commune.” The system, which became known as baojia, existed in China until 1949 and the arrival of Mao.
Confucius and Andreshko
In their own peculiar way, today's Chinese rulers are trying to create a successor—only this time with artificial intelligence at its head.
Others trace this worldview back to Confucius and a parable that our Andreshko—the wily peasant from Elin Pelin's classic story who outsmarts a bailiff—would have found highly amusing. The sage was working as an official and was offered a bribe, with the promise that no one would find out. Confucius replied: “I know, you know, heaven knows. Who, then, will not find out?”
Two similar official ratings are already in operation—the personal dang'an and the family-based hukou, which have been used for decades to control migration and employment. The new solutions simply supplement them with the capabilities of modern technology.
The various institutions responsible for the system's data report that they have collected between 10 and 90 percent of the indicators they need to fulfill their main goal.
So, although still far from the finish line, there is something real—an enormous volume of information that has been collected and processed with precision. And that is the most important part of any working system based on artificial intelligence.
Needless to say, the data in this case is big, to put it mildly—we're talking about the most populous country on Earth. And on top of that, it has a culture largely incomprehensible to Westerners.
Duke Mandarin
Here in the West, it's fairly easy to piece together a person's credit history. We have the big old credit systems, whereas far to the east there are too many people who have remained outside the system.
Do the Chinese authorities need Big Brother? Well, don't they supposedly already have him officially—the flawless facial recognition systems that let them know what every inhabitant of the Celestial Empire is doing? That, however, is yet another topic we know too little about to draw extreme conclusions. Facial recognition in that country really has reached impressive levels; in many big cities there are cameras at every step capturing and recognizing the actions of every passerby. But there are also remote regions that have never seen anything of the kind.
It's clear that the authorities in China are doing a great deal to use electronic control as far as their capabilities allow. This is a society that, to this day, has a rather different attitude toward individual freedoms. And it survives and thrives because of that rather than in spite of it.
East Wind, West Wind
And… who can convince us that the same isn't happening in the West, just more perfidiously? After it came out that even the leaders of America's closest allies had been wiretapped by the CIA.
There aren't all that many serious differences between what China's social credit system will be and what we have in Western civilization today. Won't today's banks, while deciding whether to grant you a loan, look into everything they could possibly know about you? Won't they subject you to super-strict analysis? Won't they expect you to have paid your taxes and not to have committed crimes? Doesn't the state itself, in such cases, strip you of the right to vote, for instance? Doesn't it deny you access to health care if you don't pay your insurance contributions?
Of course, problems arise when politics gets involved and those in power acquire repressive mechanisms, but… who guarantees that this doesn't happen in the West, too?
In the United States and Europe, credit-scoring systems based on artificial intelligence are actively in use. With their help, banks decide whether or not to grant a loan to a given applicant. Where exactly is the huge difference?
Chinese Restaurant
Naturally, though it's never stated outright, the idea is that the system will also be used to conveniently suppress dissent. It's very nasty, that's a fact. Fortunately, there's nothing like it in the West—just ask Snowden or Assange.
And what about the scandal that broke just recently over the Israeli spyware Pegasus, used to spy on journalists and politicians?
It's important to part with one clarification—although I really did make an effort to include sources of considerable volume and authority, with a topic like this one can never be sure amid contradictory publications, and I apologize if a mistake has crept in along the way.
The Chinese system is by no means likable and carries very serious risks, but it is instructive how it gets demonized without anyone noticing that it largely overlaps with what we already have. Technology holds incredible potential to lead us to the next step in evolution, but it easily turns into a machine for oppression, inequality, aggression, war.
The social credit system may indeed be frightening, but not for the Chinese. For all of us. Because artificial intelligence has many applications, and just as it is capable of helping build a freer and more democratic world and reviving the media, it could also become an executioner. A tool of enslavement. All it takes is for it to fall into the hands of people who know how to turn it into one.
And yet, we shape the system more than we think. With action, or with apathy.
