I must admit, I don't know a lot about China other than what I see reported on the news.
I've visited Hong Kong several times, but that was before it was assimilated into the PRC.
I've visited Macau too (twice) and Shenzhen (once) and even cycled through Tibet (from Lhasa, via Mt. Everest to Nyalam and on, across the border and down into Nepal). But these three are all peripheral territories and not PRC proper.
So in the absence of first-hand experience, I can only go on newspaper / radio / television reports.
Since I live in one, I am no fan of one-party states where the same party maintains endless power via strategic use of propaganda, nepotism and favours but it is important to understand what these power-addicted cliques are up to and what they're not.
This piece in
MIT Technology Review is a helpful myth-buster examining exactly what
Social Credit is and what it isn't.
[
technologyreview.com...]
A few observations opened my eyes.
Social Credit is, apparently, not nearly as insidious or as intrusive as my crudely formed impression of it suggested:
The West has largely gotten China’s social credit system wrong. But draft legislation introduced in November offers a more accurate picture of the reality.
For most people outside China, the words “social credit system” conjure up an instant image: a Black Mirror–esque web of technologies that automatically score all Chinese citizens according to what they did right and wrong. But the reality is, that terrifying system doesn’t exist, and the central government doesn’t seem to have much appetite to build it, either.
Initially, back in 2014, the plan was to have a national system tracking all “social credit” ready by 2020. Now it’s almost 2023, and the long-anticipated legal framework for the system was just released in the November 2022 draft law.
Contrary to popular belief, there’s no central social credit score for individuals. And frankly, the Chinese central government has never talked about wanting one.
Social Credit is an extension of the concept of financial credit scoring. It appears to be an attempt - with limited success - to apply the mechanisms which we are all familiar with in credit scoring to enable "trust barometers" - which you probably wouldn't need (or, at least, not nearly to the same degree) in market-based economies.
I am reassured by this piece that
Social Credit isn't quite the dystopian mechanism of societal control I had the vague-but-unsettling impression it was.
