Back نظام الرصيد الاجتماعي Arabic Социална кредитна система Bulgarian Sistema de crèdit social Catalan Systém sociálního kreditu Czech Kinas sociale pointsystem Danish Sozialkredit-System German Σύστημα κοινωνικής πίστωσης Greek Sistema de crédito social chino Spanish Sosiaalinen luottoluokitusjärjestelmä Finnish Système de crédit social French
| Social Credit System | |||||||
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| Simplified Chinese | 社会信用体系 | ||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 社會信用體系 | ||||||
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The Social Credit System (Chinese: 社会信用体系; pinyin: shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì) is a national credit rating and blacklist being developed by the government of China.[1] The social credit initiative calls for the establishment of a record system so that businesses, individuals and government institutions can be tracked and evaluated for trustworthiness.[2][3] There are multiple forms of the social credit system being experimented with,[4][5] while the national regulatory method is based on whitelisting (termed redlisting in China) and blacklisting.[6][7][8] There is no universal social credit score or system.
The origin of the concept can be traced back to the 1980s when the Chinese government attempted to develop a personal banking and financial credit rating system, especially for rural individuals and small businesses who lacked documented records.[9] The program first emerged in the early 2000s, inspired by the credit scoring systems in other countries.[1] The program initiated regional trials in 2009, before launching a national pilot with eight credit scoring firms in 2014.[10][7]
The Social Credit System is an extension to the existing legal and financial credit rating system in China.[11] Managed by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the People's Bank of China (PBOC) and the Supreme People's Court (SPC),[12] 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.[13][14][15] The Chinese government's stated aim is to enhance trust in society with the system and regulate businesses in areas such as food safety, intellectual property, and financial fraud.[11][9][16]
There is a common misconception that China operates a nationwide "social credit score" system that assigns individuals a score based on their behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low. However, this is not true. Western media reports have sometimes exaggerated or inaccurately described this concept.[17][18] According to the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a Berlin-based think tank, the social credit system does not continuously monitor or evaluate individual behavior. Punishments are only for violations of laws and regulations. A quantifying score does not exist.[19]
- ^ a b "China's social credit score – untangling myth from reality | Merics". merics.org. 11 February 2022. Retrieved 10 August 2022.
- ^ Stevenson, Alexandra; Mozur, Paul (22 September 2019). "China Scores Businesses, and Low Grades Could Be a Trade-War Weapon". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
- ^ Cheng, Evelyn (4 September 2019). "China is building a 'comprehensive system' for tracking companies' activities, report says". CNBC. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
- ^ Ahmed, Shazeda (1 May 2019). "The Messy Truth About Social Credit". logic magazine.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
Liu-2019was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Yang, Zeyi (22 November 2022). "China just announced a new social credit law. Here's what it means". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
- ^ a b Hornby, Lucy. "China changes tack on 'social credit' scheme plan". Financial Times. 5 July 2017. Retrieved 14 July 2017.
- ^ Matsakis, Louise (29 July 2019). "How the West Got China's Social Credit System Wrong". Wired. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
- ^ a b Cite error: The named reference
mericswas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Zhong, Yuhao (Summer 2019). "Rethinking the Social Credit System: A Long Road to Establishing Trust in Chinese Society" (PDF). Symposium on Applications of Contextual Integrity: 28–29 – via Privaci.info.
- ^ a b "China's Social Credit System: Speculation vs. Reality". The Diplomat. Archived from the original on 30 March 2021.
- ^ "What is China's social credit system and why is it controversial?". South China Morning Post. 9 August 2020. Retrieved 8 December 2020.
- ^ 国务院关于印发社会信用体系建设规划纲要（2014—2020年）的通知. Central Government of China (in Chinese (China)). Retrieved 10 November 2019.
- ^ Meissner, Mirjam (24 May 2017). "China's Social Credit System: A big-data enabled approach to market regulation with broad implications for doing business in China" (PDF). www.merics.org. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 March 2018. Retrieved 11 July 2017.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
merics_2103was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Botsman, Rachel (2017). Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart. London, UK: Portfolio Penguin.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
memewas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Cite error: The named reference
Yu-2023was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ "China's social credit score – untangling myth from reality | Merics". merics.org. 11 February 2022. Retrieved 6 July 2024.
The biggest disconnect is around the notion of scores. Some commentators seem to imagine that a magic algorithm draws from AI cameras and internet surveillance all over the country to calculate a score that determines everyone's place in society. In reality, the SoCS is not the techno-dystopian nightmare we fear: it is lowly digitalized, highly fragmented, and primarily focuses on businesses. Most importantly, such a score simply does not exist.