Social Credit System

Social Credit System
Simplified Chinese社会信用体系
Traditional Chinese社會信用體系

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]

The origin of the system 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]

China's Social Credit System has been implicated in a number of controversies.[17][18] There is no single social credit system or score. Social credit remains a fragmented set of policies and systems which impact businesses more than individuals, including financial credit reporting, blacklists for judgment debtors based on specific court orders, sectoral blacklists and redlists addressing non-compliant and compliant companies and their owners, no-fly and no-ride lists based on specific instances of train or plane passenger misconduct, and voluntary local programs which can provide rewards based on individual scores but no penalties.

  1. ^ a b "China's social credit score – untangling myth from reality | Merics". merics.org. 11 February 2022. Retrieved 10 August 2022.
  2. ^ 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.
  3. ^ Cheng, Evelyn (4 September 2019). "China is building a 'comprehensive system' for tracking companies' activities, report says". CNBC. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
  4. ^ Ahmed, Shazeda (1 May 2019). "The Messy Truth About Social Credit". logic magazine.
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference :47 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ 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.
  7. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference :2 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ Matsakis, Louise (29 July 2019). "How the West Got China's Social Credit System Wrong". Wired. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
  9. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference merics was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ 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.
  11. ^ a b "China's Social Credit System: Speculation vs. Reality". The Diplomat. Archived from the original on 30 March 2021.
  12. ^ "What is China's social credit system and why is it controversial?". South China Morning Post. 9 August 2020. Retrieved 8 December 2020.
  13. ^ 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.
  14. ^ 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.
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference merics_2103 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ Cite error: The named reference botsman trust was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  17. ^ Cheung, Rachel (17 December 2023). "The Grand Experiment: Two decades on, China's social credit system is more dysfunctional than dystopian". The Wire China. Retrieved 19 December 2023.
  18. ^ "How the West Got China's Social Credit System Wrong". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 12 November 2019.

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