SCAN YOUR LIFE IN THE DIGITAL ERA Paun, Roxana-Daniela
Annals of "Spiru Haret" University. Economic Series (English ed.),
09/2023, Volume:
23, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
"Distance doesn't separate people, silence does!" Artificial intelligence is a reality and it evolves every day, it simplifies life where it is used in the human’s interest, being already applied in ...many fields. Is there any risk of moving away from the noble goal of being at the service of the collective good and of being used against people to limit fundamental rights and freedoms? Is there any risk that the totalitarian society will re-establish itself, this time on a global level? The current study presents, in summary, a first analysis of the latest developments in this field, starting from the Chinese experience, as far as it is known and popularized regarding facial recognition made by artificial intelligence for monitoring citizens for the social credit system.
This paper investigates the impact of social credit system reform pilots on corporate carbon emissions adopting a quasi-natural experimental approach. We find that the implementation of social credit ...system reform pilots has a statistically significant impact on reducing corporate carbon emissions.
•The social credit system reform pilots reduce corporate carbon emissions.•The transmission pathways including enterprises, governments, and the public.•We examined the heterogeneity of effects at enterprise and regional levels.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Under the social credit system project, China’s government promotes credibility-based regulation (信用监管), a mode of discretionary decision-making informed by quantified assessments of regulatory ...subjects’ credibility. Credibility-based regulation is intended to combat China’s law enforcement problem by activating non-state actors to participate in regulatory work through conducting and sharing credibility assessments. However, little is known about its implementation. This article argues that a yet unexplored series of voluntary national standards provides the technical link between central-level rhetoric on credibility-based regulation and its implementation. Specifically, these standards lay down assessment methods and quantitative indicators for assessing credibility, and are drafted for the use of regulatory agencies, platform companies, industry associations and other state and non-state stakeholders. National standards provide a suitable link for implementing credibility-based regulation because, unlike top–down laws and policies, their creation involves a range of non-state affiliated actors, producing negotiated solutions that co-regulators may be more likely to adopt.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This article studies the making of a small fragment of China's social credit system by focusing on the evolution of digital mediation in the market for domestic service. We study the ongoing ...development and reconfiguration of various forms of digital mediation in the domestic service labour market from early local digital blacklisting attempts to the making of a nationwide app linked to the social credit system. We find that digital mediation so far mainly contributes to controlling domestic workers through the indicators included in the app. These indicators to a large extent reinforce existing categorisations of domestic workers. While the early blacklists were primarily market-driven, thereby resembling the platform economy outside China, the later nationwide system is closely linked to the central state and strengthens central state control over the market for domestic services.
Corporate credit reporting (CCR), which aims at increasing trust in corporates, constitutes an intriguing, yet understudied set of regulatory institutions as it is both a regulatory object and ...subject at the same time. Differences in national CCR systems pose challenges for multinational companies and have increasingly become a subject of international conflicts on regulatory standards. In this context, the case of China deserves special attention since the country pursues both institutional divergence and convergence with international examples. Hence, the characterization of China's regulatory regime remains difficult. By comparing the institutional context of CCR in China to those in the United States and Germany, this paper sheds light on a specific aspect of China's complex regulatory regime. At the same time, it provides insights into the Chinese manifestation of CCR, which are important for the international business community.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
The article focuses on the long-term trends in the development of a regulatory mechanism of social relations, determined by the introduction of digital technologies for processing reputational data ...on the behavior and characteristics of individuals and organizations into the public administration. The first part of the research examines the regime of the rule of law established in the age of modernity, highlights its vulnerabilities and the difficulty of maintaining it in the face of specific modern challenges forcing the world elites to fundamentally reform social institutions and subsystems (economy, energy, healthcare, etc.). The second part is devoted to the characterization of existing data-driven regulation technologies, considering their transformative impact on the rule of law regime. The third part presents predictive characteristics of the emerging system of social regulation; special attention is paid to the role of ethical norms in constructing a new system of social regulation over and instead of the institutions of the rule of law. It is emphasized that modern mechanisms of regulation and control, based on intelligent data analysis and often involving some form of assessment of the behavior of subjects, are super-structured over existing systems of positive law, but can easily be used to expand the control of authorities in public relations that go beyond the scope of legal regulation. Such mechanisms may include increased requirements for access to social goods and require compliance not only with legal, but also with moral and ethical norms, professional standards, and arbitrarily interpreted customs. The author concludes that the regulatory datafication results in the actual replacement of the mechanism of legal regulation by extended compliance systems, often based on opaque norms of unclear origin. The institutions of the rule of law and the regime of the supremacy of law, presupposing the certainty of norm-setting and democratic control over lawmaking, are being replaced by loyalty programs fostering only obedience.
China’s Social Credit System (SCS) has been widely considered a centralized surveillance project, whereas recent research found multiple scoring systems co-existing in various fields at multiple ...administrative levels and in diverse forms. Despite the broadened view toward the complexity of SCS, these research projects continue to focus on SCS mainly as political and digital control mechanisms. Instead, this paper is interested in the social and cultural meanings of SCS constructed in the media, both at the national and local levels. Based on the analyses of news reports since the year 2003, when the term SCS was officially coined, this paper examines the historical narratives about SCS, including its rationales, stakeholders, and intended goals/tasks. It argues that the SCS construction has been a societal project anchored in a distinct moral orientation of financial credit. While credit systems are often used to classify consumers and financial subjects in Western contexts, the case of Chinese SCS shows that the moral dimension of financial credit scoring has enabled its spread into other non-financial domains. Also, the institutionalization of such moral standards is considered an effective approach to addressing various socio-economic and ethical issues that have long baffled economic development and social justice in China’s reform era.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This article examines the technologies of power and subjectification in China's social credit system through a theoretically informed analysis of policy and legal documents as well as the narratives ...of social credit practitioners, including local officials and representatives of business partners. The ongoing project is a heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, regulations, policies, and any number of programs aiming to govern social and economic activities through problematizing, assessing, and utilizing the "trustworthiness" of individuals, enterprises, organizations, and government agencies. Drawing on governmentality studies, the article explicates the operation of governmental and disciplinary-pastoral modalities of power in the project, which are interrelated in their logics and overlap in the tactics employed. Whereas the strategy of governmental/biopolitical power is centered on achieving effective economic governance and improving regulatory compliance through technological fixes, disciplinary-pastoral power aspires to shape individual behavior and the collective mores of a locality according to a mixture of market-oriented and socialist-traditional values. Social credit is envisioned to produce and channel homo economicus and homo moralis. However, the relationships between liberal and socialist subjectivities and between rationalization and moralization are by no means coherent. The assemblage of social credit government is characterized by contradictions and contestations.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The red, yellow, and green three-colored health code apps (HCAs) have been credited as an effective tool for the COVID-19 response in China, with a golden color added indicating vaccination status in ...spring 2021. Although the success of HCA as a public health intervention might have legitimized government or corporate surveillance, the scope and contour of post-pandemic HCA use remain unclear. Both officials and tech firms have been promoting broader post-pandemic HCA use for purposes beyond pandemic control. This research draws on theories on privacy, trust, and media engagement to investigate factors affecting Chinese public opinion on HCA's post-pandemic use. Original survey data were collected in 2021 from adult HCA users in two major Chinese cities: Wuhan where COVID-19 cases were first identified and Hangzhou where the first HCA was deployed. Results point to a majority for moderate post-pandemic HCA use, while almost four out of ten users support expansive HCA use and the voice for restricted or terminated use is tiny. Greater acceptance of HCA data use by various institutional stakeholders, greater institutional trust, greater engagement with COVID-19 related social media content increased the support for expansive use.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
