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3/8/2020 How the West Got China's Social Credit System Wrong | WIRED

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LOUISE MATSAKIS SECURITY 07.29.2019 03:25 PM

How the West Got China's Social Credit System Wrong It occupies a spot next to 'Black Mirror' and Big Brother in popular imagination, but China’s social credit project is far more complicated than a single, all-powerful numerical score.

In October 2018, Vice President Mike Pence paid a visit to the Hudson Institute—a conservative

Washington, DC, think tank—to give a wide-ranging speech about the United States’

relationship with China. Standing stiffly in a shiny blue tie, he began by accusing the Chinese

Communist Party of interfering in US politics and directing Chinese businesses to steal

It occupies a spot next to Black Mirror and Big Brother in popular imagination, but China’s social credit project is far more complicated

than a single, all-powerful numerical score. STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

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American intellectual property by “any means necessary.” Pence then turned his attention to

the country’s human rights abuses, starting not with the persecution of religious minorities, but

with a peculiar governmental initiative: the social credit project. “By 2020, China’s rulers aim

to implement an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life

—the so-called ‘social credit score,’” Pence said. “In the words of that program’s official

blueprint, it will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard

for the discredited to take a single step.’”

The vice president’s remarks echoed a steady stream of Western media reports, published in

dozens of outlets over the past few years, that paint China’s Social Credit System as a dystopian

nightmare straight out of Black Mirror. The articles and broadcast segments often said China’s

central government is using a futuristic algorithm to compile people’s social media

connections, buying histories, location data, and more into a single score dictating their rights

and freedoms. The government can supposedly analyze footage from hundreds of millions of

facial-recognition-equipped surveillance cameras in real time, and then dock you points for

misbehavior like jaywalking or playing too many video games.

PRI's The World

This story was produced in collaboration with PRI's The World, the award-winning public

radio show and podcast on global issues, news, and insights from BBC, WGBH, PRI, and PRX. It

was coreported by The World's Lydia Emmanou ilidou. You can listen to The World's audio

program about China's social credit score here.

But there is no single, all-powerful score assigned to every individual in China, at least not yet.

The “official blueprint” Pence referenced is a planning document released by China’s chief

administrative body five years ago. It calls for the establishment of a nationwide scheme for

tracking the trustworthiness of everyday citizens, corporations, and government officials. The

Chinese government and state media say the project is designed to boost public confidence

and fight problems like corruption and business fraud. Western critics often see social credit

instead as an intrusive surveillance apparatus for punishing dissidents and infringing on

people’s privacy.

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With just over a year to go until the government’s self-imposed deadline for establishing the

laws and regulations governing social credit, Chinese legal researchers say the system is far

from the cutting-edge, Big Brother apparatus portrayed in the West’s popular imagination. “I

really think you would find a much larger percentage of Americans are aware of Chinese social

credit than you would find Chinese people are aware of Chinese social credit,” says Jeremy

Daum, a senior research fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center in Beijing. The

system as it exists today is more a patchwork of regional pilots and experimental projects, with

few indications about what could be implemented at a national scale.

That’s not to say that fears about social credit are entirely unfounded. The Chinese government

is already using new technologies to control its citizens in frightening ways. The internet is

highly censored, and each person’s cell phone number and online activity is assigned a unique

ID number tied to their real name. Facial-recognition technology is also increasingly

widespread in China, with few restraints on how it can be used to track and surveil citizens.

The most troubling abuses are being carried out in the western province of Xinjiang, where

human rights groups and journalists say the Chinese government is detaining and surveilling

millions of people from the minority Muslim Uyghur population on a nearly unprecedented

scale.

But Western concerns about what could happen with China’s Social Credit System have in

some ways outstripped discussions about what's already really occurring. Critiques are often

based on worst-case scenarios far off in the future, and run the risk of minimizing the

troubling aspects of the project as it is in place today. The exaggerated portrayals may also

help to downplay surveillance efforts in other parts of the world. “Because China is often held

up as the extreme of one end of a spectrum, I think that it moves the goalposts for the whole

conversation,” says Daum. “So that anything less invasive than our imagined version of social

credit seems sort of acceptable, because at least we’re not as bad as China.”

How Misconceptions Formed

One of the earliest Western accounts was published by an unlikely source: the American Civil

Liberties Union, which doesn’t operate in China. As part of his job as a policy analyst at the

ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Jay Stanley blogs about emerging threats to

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civil liberties. On October 5, 2015, he published a post titled “China’s Nightmarish Citizen

Scores Are a Warning for Americans.” The article is representative of much of the initial wave

of coverage, which was often derived from secondhand information that traveled like a game

of telephone, rather than on-the-ground reporting. Stanley’s post was sourced largely from a

similar story from Privacy News Online, which itself was based on an article from a Swedish

website.

Today Stanley says he intended to highlight China’s program as a cautionary tale for the US.

“This really seemed to be pointing the way towards a dark potential future,” he says. “There

were frankly a lot of signs and similarities to things happening in the United States,” like digital

profiling. The ACLU post wasn’t the only outlet to use China’s nascent system as a way to draw

attention to privacy and surveillance issues in the West. “The more I look around, the more it

seems like an American social credit system is springing up around us—and it doesn’t look all

that different from China’s,” Casey Newton, a writer at The Verge, wrote in his popular

newsletter just last month. "China's Dystopian Tech Could Be Contagious," The Atlantic

similarly declared last year.

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A demonstration of monitoring technology at the headquarters of Huawei Technologies in Shenzhen earlier this year. BILLY H.C.

KWOK/GETTY IMAGES

While a number of journalists and academics have tried to correct the record, the science

fiction myths about China’s social credit score continue to endure in the West. “There’s so

much that’s been written about this now that’s wrong, that it’s really taken on a life of its own,”

says Shazeda Ahmed, a PhD student at the University of California at Berkeley studying the

Social Credit System in China. “I still see articles quoting things from 2014, 2015, that I thought

were largely debunked.”

The confusion is understandable, though. First, there’s the language barrier. Daum says the

phrase “social credit,” has different connotations in English that it does in Chinese. To an

English speaker, the two words together might signal a reference to interpersonal

relationships. In Chinese, the term is more closely associated with a phrase like “public trust.”

There’s also the added linguistic hurdle of deciphering dense legal documents. “I think

language is a real barrier,” says Daum. “Both legal jargon and political jargon and Chinese

versus English.”

The original plan for social credit released in 2014 is also vague and sweeping, and it wasn’t

entirely clear what the project might ultimately consist of. “They expected the different parts of

the government, both centrally and locally, to try out their own approach in terms of

implementation,” says Xin Dai, a professor and associate dean at China’s Ocean University Law

School, who has researched social credit. “You have this really massive but also chaotic scene

of different people trying to put together different types of programs.”

For example, the government partnered with corporations on some early initiatives, including

“credit scores” calculated by private tech companies, like Ant Financial’s Sesame Credit

program. In 2015 the Chinese government authorized eight tech companies, including Ant

Financial, an affiliate of the corporate giant Alibaba, to experiment with developing credit

reporting systems for individuals. In addition to financial data, Sesame Credit does take into

consideration things like social media connections and purchasing habits—a product feature

that garnered a lot of attention in the West, including in a WIRED cover story.

By 2017, the Chinese government had decided that none of the pilots would receive

authorization to be official credit reporting measures, due to concerns about potential conflicts

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of interest. But initially, it was unclear how closely tied the programs would be to the

government’s efforts, even in China. “I think there were, and maybe still are, Chinese citizens

who didn’t quite understand that there was a difference as well,” says Ahmed. “Because in the

beginning, Sesame Credit was marketing itself as contributing to the whole Social Credit

System.”

Today, Sesame Credit, as well as other similar initiatives, essentially function like loyalty

rewards programs. Participants with high scores earn privileges like renting a bike without

leaving a deposit or deferring payment for medical expenses, but the scores are not part of the

legal system, and no one is required to participate.

The state-run projects that have captured the most attention in the West are the local pilots.

Dozens of Chinese cities are experimenting with their own versions of social credit, and some

have designed programs that do give individuals a personal numerical ranking. These

initiatives largely don’t rely on mass surveillance or supercharged artificial intelligence, and

many citizens may not even know they exist. It’s difficult to generalize about all of them, since

they can vary widely. Some are incorporating blockchain technology, for example. For now it’s

not clear when, if ever, any of them will be adopted at the national level.

The city of Rongcheng, about 500 miles from Beijing, is one place assigning residents

individual social credit scores. According to policy documents outlining the project that Daum

translated, it’s relatively limited in scope. In order to lose points in the system, you would need

to violate an existing law, regulation, or contract you entered. Maintaining “Exceptional

Creditworthiness” is thus a matter of following the rules already in place. The benefits of

maintaining a high score are also fairly modest, like free health checkups and the ability to

apply for an interest-free loan. “Looking at how fragmented this implementation is, you see

that different governments don’t have quite the same resources,” says Ahmed. “Some of the

smaller cities, they can only subsidize fairly unexciting benefits.”

Blacklists and Red Lists

The primary mechanism of the Social Credit System are the nationwide blacklists and red lists.

Each regulatory agency was asked to come up with a rap sheet of its worst offenders,

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businesses and individuals who violated preexisting industry regulations. The red lists are the

exact opposite—they’re rosters of companies and people that have been particularly

compliant. Those archives were then made public on a centralized website, called China

Credit, where anyone can search them. Think of the Better Business Bureau, or letter grades

given to restaurants.

Many regulatory agencies have signed memorandums of understanding with each other, in

which they promise to punish people and businesses on one another’s blacklists.

Hypothetically, if this system were in the US, a business might now face additional penalties

from the Environmental Protection Agency for breaking a rule at the Food and Drug

Administration. There’s no evidence that citizens’ social media or purchasing data is being

incorporated, at least not yet. “They’re making it so that these records are communicated to

other agencies,” says Daum. “Somehow, that got interpreted as everything you do is being

watched all the time in a panopticon, and that I have not seen.”

Chinese legal researchers are worried about one of these databases in particular: The Supreme

People’s Court maintains a blacklist of people who the government alleges did not comply

with court judgments, for example by not paying fines, but also things like failing to formally

apologize to someone they are found to have wronged. Being on the blacklist now comes with

harsh punishments. You might be unable to purchase high-speed train tickets, fly on an

airplane, or send your kids to a private school. Over 13 million people were on the list as of

March, according to state reports, and the government has prohibited more than 20 million

plane tickets from being purchased.

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People pour through China's Hangzhou East train station. NI YANQIANG/ZHEJIANG DAILY/VCG/GETTY IMAGES

Yu-Jie Chen, a Taiwanese human rights lawyer and post-doctoral researcher at the Institutum

Iurisprudentiae of Academia Sinica, says the judgement defaulter’s blacklist is imposing “layers

of disproportionate, arbitrary, and wide-ranging punishments,” on people who have largely

already suffered the consequences of breaking the law. She says she’s also worried about how

the list penalizes people who didn’t commit any offense, like a child who is barred from

attending certain schools because of their parent’s actions. It’s not clear whether citizens can

effectively get off the list if they’re included on it by accident, or even if they fulfill their court-

ordered obligations.

To enforce these punishments, Ahmed has written that the government is sharing blacklists

with technology platforms. That way, people on them can’t do things like book flights or buy

train tickets online. Local governments are also asking social media companies to help

orchestrate public shaming initiatives. In the southern city of Nanning, the social media app

Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) partnered with the local court to broadcast photos of

blacklisted people between videos, like a digital mugshot. In the northern city of Shijiazhuang,

blacklisted people and entities are displayed on a map within the messaging app WeChat. The

features aren’t yet widespread, but still raise privacy concerns, especially if people are

wrongfully added to a blacklist and that information is then broadcast to everyone they know.

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Social Credit's Future

As the 2020 deadline approaches, China’s Social Credit System still remains largely in

development. There are some signs, however, that the system could soon incorporate more

forms of data collection. For example, Chen says, the China Credit website already encourages

users to log in by scanning their faces, though it’s not mandatory. “So there will be a facial-

recognition element if the government can persuade people to use that more,” she explains.

In the meantime, Dai says, Chinese academics have begun discussing the potential privacy and

other risks posed by the project. They were influenced, in part, by the enormous amount of

attention the Social Credit System has garnered in the West, despite the fact that it often hasn’t

been portrayed accurately. “This entire thing is just so massive, and it varies across place to

place” says Dai. “It is easy to sort of misinterpret or only catch part of it, without seeing the

entire picture.”

This story was produced in collaboration with PRI's The World, the award-winning public

radio show and podcast on global issues, news, and insights from BBC, WGBH, PRI, and PRX.

It was coreported by The World's Lydia Emmanouilidou. You can listen to The World's audio

program about China's social credit score here.

Updated 10-25-19, 12:07 pm ET: This story originally stated that the city of Nanning partnered

with the social media app Tiktok. It has been updated to reflect that the partnership was with

Douyin, the Chinese version of the network, which TikTok says is a separate organization.

Both share the same parent company Bytedance.

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