The Social Credit system in China is a plan that the Communist Party hopes will build a culture of “sincerity” and a “harmonious socialist society” where “keeping trust is glorious.” The ambition is to collect every scrap of information available online about China’s companies and citizens in a single place — and then assign each of them a score based on their political, commercial, social and legal “credit.”
The government hasn’t announced [as of Oct. 2016] exactly how the plan will work — for example, how scores will be compiled and different qualities weighted against one another. But the idea is that good behavior will be rewarded and bad behavior punished, with the Communist Party acting as the ultimate judge. This is what China calls “Internet Plus,” … Harnessing the power of big data and the ubiquity of smartphones, e-commerce and social media in a society where 700 million people live large parts of their lives online.
—Washington Post, “China’s plan to organize its society relies on ‘big data’ to rate everyone”
The Social Credit System is a national credit rating and blacklist being developed by the government of the People’s Republic of China. The program initiated regional trials in 2009, before launching a national pilot with eight credit scoring firms in 2014. It was first introduced formally by then Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, on October 20, 2011. Managed by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), and Supreme People’s Court (SPC), 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.
The social credit initiative calls for the establishment of a unified record system so that businesses, individuals and government institutions can be tracked and evaluated for trustworthiness. There are multiple, different forms of the social credit system being experimented with, while the national regulatory method is based on blacklisting and whitelisting. The credit system is closely related to China’s mass surveillance systems such as Skynet, which incorporates facial recognition, big data analysis, and artificial intelligence.
—Wikipedia, “Social Credit System“
“This is what China calls “Internet Plus,” but critics call a 21st-century police state.” – BEHIND THE FIREWALL: How China tamed the Internet | This is part 5 of 6 of a series examining the impact of China’s Great Firewall, a mechanism of Internet censorship and surveillance that affects nearly 700 million users.
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