As a promising Social Science Methodology, Structural/Mechanism Explanation (SME) retains the advantages of mechanism-based explanation (ME), particularly its focus on “identifying causal patterns ...from micro-level social phenomena.” It also acknowledging the role of “structure”—seen as “macro-level conditions”—in incentivizing or disincentivizing key mechanisms, thus proving valuable for forecasting their emergence and decline. This article explores the theory of SME and applies it to examine how a revitalized “Legalist political structure coupled with a Confucianist ideological structure” can forecast the mechanisms by which China’s National Social Credit System disciplines and punishes the citizens. This is observed across domains of legislation, administration, judiciary, and propaganda.
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This article situates China’s social credit system in a historical perspective by exploring its antecedents. The historical roots of the social credit system can be found in personnel archives for ...officials during imperial times, the Dang’an (personnel dossier) system under Communist rule, and the failed legislative proposal to establish “morality files” on Chinese citizens in the early 2010s. By recognizing their historical continuity and disjuncture, the article places the social credit system in its unique sociocultural contexts and provides alternative narratives to the current dominant state framing of the social credit system.
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La inteligencia artificial (IA) puede considerarse una industria, tal como se concibe a ésta en la teoría económica. En ese contexto se observan dos procesos simultáneos: concurrencia ycooperación. ...Es bajo este escenario que, entonces, conviene situar la actual disputa entre China y Estados Unidos por el liderazgo mundial en IA. Así, resulta de sumo interés en el presente trabajo describir políticas y medidas concretas, que el régimen chino siguió adelante no sólo para promover su industria de IA, sino también para identificar cuál es su estrategia para aumentar su influencia en los procesos de estandarización en la incipiente industria.
Is the convergence of new technologies and an authoritarian state bound to create an all-encompassing surveillance system? Is this happening in China with the Social Credit System (
, abb. SCS)? ...Grounded in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this article aims to describe the nature of the project by focusing on its inception and retracing how the initial visions materialized into the system that is now in place. It will do so by seeking to identify the sociotechnical imaginaries rooted in the SCS with the premise that these imaginaries, in particular the ones proposed by authoritative actors, shape the development trajectory of the SCS. Next, it asks whether the dominant sociotechnical imaginaries are control and power legitimation. By touching upon the role of officials, academics, private companies, and citizens in negotiating what is practicable and what is desirable, this article argues that the SCS does not follow a determined trajectory toward technologically enabled dictatorship. It is the result of a process that Sheila Jasanoff has described as co-production, as the various actors embed their values into the project by imagining, engineering, using or even rejecting elements of the SCS. This article finds that before even knowing all the possibilities offered by new technologies, a certain future was envisioned and shared. Rather than the need for control and surveillance, actors emphasized the importance of trustworthiness, the advancement of a post-industrial society, quality of life, and a sense of community. In a certain way, technology was expected to offer a solution to most, if not all social problems. The room left for experimentation supports the argument that sociotechnical imaginaries have the potential to impact the development trajectory of the SCS project. The article concludes that, after more than 20 years since its inception, the SCS is still a policy under construction, whose interpretation and use is yet to be stabilized.
Algorithms are playing an increasingly huge role becoming a big part of human lives. With the conceptualisation of algorithms as a socio-technical system, this study investigates algorithm ...initiatives in Korea and China in terms of the opportunities, risks, and challenges embedded in their development. This study analyses algorithm development and trends from a critical socio-technical lens: social, technological, cultural, and industrial phenomena that represent strategic interactions involving people, technology, and society and elicit sensitive legal, cultural, and ethical rhetoric issues. Despite rosy predictions and proactive drives, new risks related to privacy, transparency, and fairness emerge as critical concerns of the social ramifications of algorithms and of their impacts on the new information milieu. With these emerging issues, questions are raised on the ways to govern algorithms and to respond to potential outcomes that such a policy approach may have on society and industry. Both Korea and China will likely struggle with the social cost of AI as it challenges what it means to be fair, transparent, and accountable. The socio-political implications of algorithms are discussed to identify key issues as both countries progress toward an algorithm-based, AI-driven society.
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The basic principles of SCS implementation are as follows: Formation of sustainable social structure and its operational management; Monitoring and correction of social transformations and behavior ...of the general population: transparency as a major factor in the life of an innovative society; Stimulating competition as a motivation for success. Due to the transparency of social life, different patterns of behavior in different conditions are published in the information space of the society. Accordingly, actionable life scenarios are made available to the general public, which is fulfilling an educational mission regarding adaptation mechanisms in an innovative society; the SCS system is a significant component of the national strategy of integration and consolidation of the Chinese innovation society; carrying out softpolicy foreign policy: The positive experience of the Chinese innovation society in implementing SCS is a prerequisite for expanding its area of application in Asian, African and Latin American countries, especially the countries participating in the One Belt One Road project. SCS covers all spheres of social life of the modern Chinese citizen, forms a sustainable form of accountability to the society for the content and flow of their daily activities, aspirations and preferences.
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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In the Chinese criminal legal system, the term ‘Qianke’ (前科) is conceptually interchangeable with the idea of a criminal record that lists one’s past crimes, convictions and sentences. In this ...article, by situating Qianke within the context of China’s distinct criminal justice and social governance ethos, my central claim is that the status quo of the Qianke system features disorganised, discriminatory and dispersed modes of social and penal controls. Specifically, the management of Qianke represents an uncoordinated structure in which criminal record data are regulated by divergent rules and institutions but remain under the complete control of the state. Although largely inaccessible to the general public, the discriminatory effect of Qianke is sweeping. By and large, it is characterised by the imposition of restraints on not only individuals with a criminal record but also their families in accessing equal opportunities in education, employment and public services. This distinctive form of state discrimination is informed by an emerging concern with risk prevention within Chinese criminal justice policy which is further enhanced by Qianke’s orchestrated penetration into the social system (e.g. via the Social Credit System). Moving from the criminal legal system to the social system, Qianke also serves as a tool of control aimed at managing individuals with a criminal history in a way that is conducive to the state’s prioritised governance agenda.
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In the European Union, the United States and other countries of the so-called Western world, the perception of the functionalities of AI, and other instruments of Industrial Revolution 4.0 ...significantly differs from its perception by the PRC’s authorities, which – for a few years – have been implementing solutions aimed at comprehensive scrutiny and social supervision rather than facilitating life and work. This idea has been reflected in the so-called Social Credit System since at least 2014 and has given rise to plenty of controversies and disputes, unfortunately based on emotions and imprecise interpretation of the characteristics, aims, and implementation of the project rather than knowledge. While the new, digital model of social management in China is extensively discussed in the literature, it is rarely addressed in Polish studies, which results in the scarcity of publications on this subject. This paper attempts to fill this gap by presenting the essence of the system and the progress of its implementation.
Losing Face Ivanhoe, Philip J.
Religions (Basel, Switzerland ),
11/2020, Volume:
11, Issue:
11
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Notions of “face” play a central role in traditional East Asian ethics and, in particular, in Confucian views about the self and its cultivation. Awareness of and attention to face is central to ...self-reflection and evaluation and, when properly employed, motivate one to continue to strive to improve oneself morally. Today, the Chinese Communist Party seeks to monitor and control its population by means of an extensive system of surveillance that is increasingly controlled by artificial intelligence programs. This not only undermines traditional conceptions of face but ultimately the role and ability of the party to set and enforce its own view of what Chinese citizens should seek and pursue.
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