The 'Social Credit System' revisited
A vague slogan with the same name actually exists, but it doesn't have much to do with the Western SCS narrative.
View from China with an Austrian School of Economics Perspective
This is a slightly expanded repost of a tweet response we recently posted on X. It’s a follow-up to the first analysis we published on this topic in December 2021. That article can be found here:
It's a paradox. While almost no-one in China has ever heard of this 'social credit system' (SCS) which has been plastered all over the Western press and social media for the past 7 or so years, the word does exist in Chinese government bureaucratese.
So how can this be? What is going on here?
Creating new slogans is a favorite pastime for Chinese bureaucrats, and the Chinese equivalent of the SCS (社会信用系统) is indeed one of those slogans (口号). What you have to understand is that many of these countless unclear slogans fail to translate into anything real, while others languish in a never-never land characterized by a vague pronouncements and declarations of intentions. As a result, very few Chinese outside the party pay much attention to them. To put it another way, even if they happen to run across them, most people don't bother to try to guess what they might mean. The 'SCS' is one such slogan.
This can be a bit hard for highly politicized Westerners to appreciate, since they tend to pay far more attention to government pronouncements than Chinese do.
Since China still lacks an individual credit rating system along the lines of the US FICO or German SCHUFA system, creating something similar would seem to make sense. But how might it actually work in practice? You will be hard put to find out from official Chinese government pronouncements. What seems far more likely is that they will slowly evolve from the existing standalone opt-in systems created by Alibaba and Tencent.
If you do however want to hear about the Chinese government's vision, recently Iain Davis, a promoter of the 'Black Mirror' style Western SCS narrative, dug up a useful speech on the topic with an English translation. Here’s the link to the video:
https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d674e7a55444d33457a6333566d54/index.html.
While it’s a bit out of date (2019), the 5-minute clip summarizes what aspects of China's ‘social credit system’ exist, plus Beijing’s vague vision for the future. In his answer to a journalist’s question, the government official in the video mentions that there have been lots of “proposals” and that it’s a “long-term project”. Though he mostly talks about exposing “bad” companies, he does also obliquely imply that there exists some kind of plan for an individual credit rating. He cites the consumption restrictions related to buying certain types of tickets as being a part of this overall plan. (These are applied to people who fail to pay court judgments - no need for a 'social credit score'.) He also mentions that some people found guilty of unruly behavior on board trains were banned. However, that's about it. There are no other details referring to individual credit ratings.
Such fuzzy slogans seem to be waiting to be filled with content, and that is what some folks in the West did with this. In fact, as elaborated in the above-mentioned analysis we published on Substack in December 2021, it was made into a key component of the broader 'China Dystopia' psyop.
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A “Social Credit System” remains a favorite wet dream of the governing bureaucracy in the West.
It’s not just some vague slogan. I personally know someone who’s been banned to fly, take the high-speed train and stay in star-rated hotels simply because they’re directors of a company that lost a law suit for damages amounted to a couple of million RMB. They’ve appealed the case and won, but had to jump through hoops to remove the credit label, to no avail for months.