The Social Credit System (SCS, 社会信用体系, shèhuì xìnyòng tĭxì), is an extremely interesting, ultimately nationwide pilot project, consisting of establishing the system of social rating, which, based on ...data collected over decades and stored both analog and with the use of state-of-the-art technologies will create profiles of citizens and businesses in the People’s Republic of China. The system focuses on four main spheres – national enterprises and economy, society, the judiciary, and public administration. It is in them that a higher level of social trust and security will be ensured, law regulations better observed, corruption eliminated, and proper transparency guaranteed. In analyzing the issue of the Western world’s attitude to the mechanism of digital surveillance and control of business and social activity in China, I should seek answers to the following questions, intriguing from the cognitive and practical perspective: Which of the above interpretations seems to be closer to the truth?; can the SCS have, at least partially, a universal character in the European Union, especially in the societies with a different system of values and the countries with a different political system than the one of the PRC?
India and China have launched enormous projects aimed at collecting vital personal information regarding their billion-plus populations and building the world’s biggest data sets in the process. ...However, both Aadhaar in India and the Social Credit System in China are controversial and raise a plethora of political and ethical concerns. The governments claim that participation in these projects is voluntary, even as they link vital services to citizens registering with these projects. In this study, we analyze how the news media in India and China—crucial data intermediaries that shape public perceptions on data and technological practices—framed these projects since their inception. Topic modeling suggests news coverage in both nations disregards the public interest and focuses largely on how businesses can benefit from them. The media, institutionally and ideologically linked with governments and corporations, show little concern with violations of privacy and mass surveillance that these projects could lead to. We argue that this renders citizens structurally incapable of making a meaningful “choice” about whether or not to participate in such projects. Implications for various stakeholders are discussed.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The Battle for the Internet Campanella, Edoardo; Haigh, John
Survival (London),
01/2024, Volume:
66, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
For the last two centuries, great powers have fiercely competed to set the technical standards for leading technologies. By imposing their preferred standards, nations not only solve technical ...problems to their advantage, but also project power globally. Given the internet's economic, political and social importance, its governance represents the regulatory battleground of the future. The internet is heavily dependent on shared standards that enable highly decentralised components developed by disparate parties to be integrated into an effective overall system. However, authoritarian regimes want the basic governing structure of the internet to be determined by states. In particular, China is now proposing a fundamental internet redesign, known as the 'New IP'. Although the West has strenuously resisted any such transformation, the battle for the internet governance of the future will be fierce. Setting the rules is not exclusively about addressing technical issues or projecting global power. It also turns on promoting different visions of the world - a decentralised and democratic one, or a centralised and authoritarian one.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
35.
China’s Social Credit System: Look inside and Out Trakhtenberg A.D.
Diskurs pi : filosofii͡a︡, politika, vlastʹ, svi͡a︡zi s obshchestvennostʹi͡u︡ : Di pi = Discourse P : philosophy, politics, power, public relations,
03/2019
4 (37)
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The article analyzes the plans of the PRC government to build a social credit system, within the framework of which the integration of databases accumulated by both authorities and private IT ...companies should be carried out. It is shown that the external reaction to the creation of a social credit system does not coincide with the internal one. Outside of China, the social credit system was perceived as an instrument of comprehensive social and political surveillance using artificial intelligence, social networks, the Internet of things, and other latest advances in information technology. In China itself, the system of social credit sees a tool of preemptive management through reputation, designed to increase the level of interpersonal trust, the level of trust in government and the society manageability. The implementation of this system in practice is still at the level of numerous (at least 40) local pilot projects, in which the discretion of local authorities plays a significant role. The author concludes that the comprehensive system of social credit is still rather a propaganda project that instills optimism in the citizens of China and generates dystopic fears in the surrounding world.
This article offers a critical analysis of China’s health code system, a data-powered pandemic control and contact tracing system that supposedly subjects all individuals in the country to its ...panopticon control, a surveillance system that monitors and categorises the Chinese population into the healthy (green), the dubious (yellow), and the unhealthy (red). The article highlights the pretence of surveillance as care and the digital divide that normalises discrimination against the elderly and other digitally left-behind population. It also illustrates how, from policy making and technological design to user engagement, the health code system is implemented, optimised, and used in everyday life to meet the needs of the vulnerable population. The health code is better taken as a medium of adaptable and communicative process that can reset the relation between the system and the lifeworld. It is the process of interchange between the system and the lifeworld that deserves our critical attention.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OBVAL, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
The Chinese Social Credit System (SCS), known as the first national digitally-implemented credit rating system, consists of two parallel arms: a government-run and a commercial one. The ...government-run arm of the SCS, especially efforts to blacklist and redlist individuals and organizations, has attracted significant attention worldwide. In contrast, the commercial part has been less often in the public spotlight except for discussions about Zhima Credit.
The commercial arm of the SCS, also referred to as the Consumer Credit Reporting System (CCRS), has been under development for about two decades and took a major step forward in 2015 when 8 companies were granted permission to implement pilot consumer credit reporting programs. This development fundamentally increased the reach and impact of the SCS due to these companies’ sizable customer base and access to vast troves of consumer-related information.
In this paper, we first map the Chinese CCRS to understand the actors in the credit reporting ecosystem. Then, we study 13 consumer credit reporting companies to examine how they collect and use personal information. Based on the findings, we discuss the relationship between the CCRS and the SCS including the changes in the power relationships between the government, consumer credit reporting companies and Chinese citizens.
Challenging Western Legal Orientalism Infantino, Marta; Wang, Weiwei
European journal of comparative law and governance,
03/2021, Volume:
8, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Abstract
In 2014 the Chinese State Council announced the establishment of a nationwide comprehensive social credit system. Western narratives often describe the initiative as a technologically ...enhanced tool of autocratic control for scoring people. Yet, as the paper aims to show, similar accounts are tainted by several misunderstandings which perpetuate Western orientalist postures towards Chinese law.
For the purpose of comparatively assessing the Chinese social credit system, the paper analyses the pilot programs set up to monitor people and enterprises’ behaviour by twenty-eight Chinese cities. The analysis will demonstrate that these pilot programs rely on low-tech methodologies, have limited strings attached, and are based on a relatively transparent legal framework. From a comparative perspective, our findings suggest that Chinese cities’ experiments raise problems that are similar to those posed by measurement practices widely employed in the West.
The purpose of this article is to identify and analyze the ideas currently available in world science and practice among foreign researchers on the Social Credit System (SCS). The article analyzes ...the basic principles of SCS, which allowed us to draw the following conclusions: the social credit system for China is very close to ours mentally and historically, it fits well with the management paradigm based on the principles of Confucianism and Taoism, its main task is to promote the formation of citizens’ behavior based on openness, following rituals.
The main conclusions are made, such as the fact that this system allows you to put into practice the principle of the golden mean, that the application of SCS will contribute to the formation of citizens’ behavior on the basis of openness, following rituals and the desire for peace of mind. The formation of the population’s habit of living in the context of SCS, as the authors believe, will help to increase the sincerity of life. An analysis of the materials of foreign researchers was carried out in the article, which gave reason to conclude that the social credit system, launched in China, so far scares the rest of the world. In this regard, the article discusses the five main fears associated with SCS, as well as the five advantages of introducing this system, draws conclusions, and develops recommendations.
This article examines how new types of performance appraisal reconfigure everyday personal relationships at work. These systems deploy smartphone technologies to be used continuously by individuals ...to rate each other. Our aim is to show, in concrete terms, how these practices claim to configure a democratic space where individuals are liberated to express their views about each other's work. On the contrary, we argue that by being placed in continuous confrontation with each other's ratings, the genuine space for democratic contestation, for the establishment of a genuine community, as well as for critique and dissent is—paradoxically—narrowed down. The first section of this article explores the context in which managerialism has become consolidated at the centre of neo-liberal politics in a dialogue with some of Mouffe's and Rancière's arguments. We use Rancière's concept of "policing" to understand how managerial techniques subvert genuine democratic spaces, modes of participation and expression. Using performance appraisal systems as an example, the second part of the article provides a critical investigation which shows how managerialism intervenes at the very roots of possible democratic engagement and undermines dissent in subtle ways.
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