Transcript: China “appears to be… construct[ing] the ultimate tool of social control”… a “comprehensive ‘credit score’ system”… that will “make your head spin.” That’s what the American Civil...
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Transcript: China “appears to be… construct[ing] the ultimate tool of social control”… a “comprehensive ‘credit score’ system”… that will “make your head spin.”
That’s what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote on October 5th, 2015.
This newly emerging, soon to be all-encompassing surveillance network, it said, would give everyone in China a score between 350 and 950. But unlike, say, American credit scores, these would punish everything from jaywalking to government criticism. Even more disturbingly, you could be responsible for the actions of friends and family.
The rest of this article mainly focused on the United States. The ACLU, after all, is an American non-profit. It lobbies for things like free speech, privacy, and criminal justice reform. This was not new reporting. The author was open about his sources — other articles he had read online. Neither did he claim any expertise on China. In fact, just three days later, he updated the article, softening the tone and emphasizing that he only meant to caution against “potential abuses” in America.
But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that a high-profile, well-respected institution had stamped its seal of approval and other organizations took notice. Two days after the original ACLU article went live and a day before it issued the update, Computerworld re-published it, calling the Chinese system “Orwellian”. Popular Science wrote that although, quote, “the system isn’t explicitly dystopian yet… it has all the pieces to be dystopian at a moment’s notice.” And Reason claimed these scores would soon “define Chinese citizens' lives”. In less than a week, the Social Credit System had not only entered the English-media landscape, but also, seemingly, amassed a body of evidence. Multiple sources endorsing the same alarming conclusion. Never mind that they all referenced the same ACLU report written by a non-expert, largely about the United States, itself based on earlier speculation.
News travels fast. And headlines even faster. There was no need for some grand conspiracy to smear China or bad faith on the part of any individual author. The simple market pressures of 21st-century journalism were enough to make a story appear out of thin air. America’s (often quite justified) suspicion of the Chinese government and technology in general, were just icing on the cake. Since then, the social credit system has truly taken on a life of its own, with coverage by the Financial Times, Economist, Fortune, and countless others. This now eight year-old game of telephone culminated in an appearance at the White House, with Vice President Mike Pence describing it as “an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life.”
And yet, ask a friend, colleague, or classmate who’s spent time in China about their experience and you’ll likely be met with confusion.
This is not a case of censorship. The Chinese government does engage in extensive censorship, but for the social credit system to work as described, the public must be, at a minimum, aware of its existence. Neither is this the result of propaganda. The government does engage in propaganda, but in this case, the response is not anger, frustration, or disagreement — just confusion.
Because, for all its well-documented, genuine atrocities, the “Orwellian” credit score system imagined by many in the media simply doesn’t exist. The truth, however, is far more revealing.
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In June 2014, the State Council of China published this “Planning Outline for the Establishment of a Social Credit System”.
Now, the first thing you should know about this document is that it’s incredibly boring and almost artfully vague. Full of dense phrases like “Promote the improvement of legal person governance”, you almost have to admire how little it manages to say in 16,000 Chinese characters.
The second thing to note is the broader context in which it was released. One month earlier, in May of 2014, the same government announced what it described as a “war on terror” against violent extremism in Xinjiang. This would later evolve into a full-blown attack on Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities including mass incarceration, surveillance, and violence that continues, in modified form, to this day.
In other words, this was a time when much of the world was becoming — understandably — increasingly skeptical of the Chinese government, and here was this new, suspiciously ambiguous notion of “social credit”. The motive for some kind of inescapable system of surveillance and control seemed undeniable.
In fact, what made the myth so potent was that it did contain an element of truth. In the years since, China has constructed a similarly oppressive, albeit less high-tech, police state in Xinjiang, involving DNA collection, phone searches, and security checkpoints.
Besides, what else could the term “social credit” refer to? And if it truly had nothing to hide, why was the plan written in such cryptic language?
But what few casual observers understood is that cryptic, inscrutable Leninist-steeped jargon is kind of the Chinese Communist Party’s whole thing. And there’s a very specific reason.
The benefits of autocracy for an autocrat are so obvious — complete, unchecked authority — that it’s easy to forget the trade-off. With complete authority comes complete responsibility. There’s no one to blame. Consider how often Democrats and Republicans use each other as scapegoats. Dictators don’t have that luxury. So, to insulate themselves from criticism, they often delegate a lot more power than you might expect.
Now, make no mistake, Beijing always gets the final word, but think of it as an architect. It produces the national blueprint, first in the form of a policy document, and later, a policy outline, but whose actual implementation it outsources to lower levels of government — its engineers. When the actual building looks nothing like the concept art, the central government can keep its hands clean by pointing to its beautifully vague, boringly-unobjectionable sketches. At the same time, it also, of course, has things it wants to accomplish — things that need to be communicated to the ‘engineers’.
Thus, while these policy documents, as we saw, are indeed horribly tedious, they’re not entirely devoid of content. You just have to understand Party-speak.
So, what did it mean by “social credit”?
According to Jeremy Daum, Senior Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and someone fluent in Party-speak, it was never a single policy. It wasn’t even a very well-outlined goal. Instead, it was always, quote, “shorthand for a broad range of efforts”.
The first of which was financial.
In short, the millions born before the One-Child Policy became law in 1980 were in their prime working-age years during the Chinese boom of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. That large mass of workers kept labor costs down, attracting foreign companies, who, in turn, invested that profit back into the country. But, as all those workers began to retire, Chinese labor became a lot more expensive, leading to lower profits, and therefore, less investment. That investment, however, could be replaced with consumption.
In summary: if China was to keep growing, it needed to start spending. Yet, at the time, just one-fifth of the population had a credit report. Without banks or credit cards, they couldn’t take out loans. And without loans, they couldn’t spend as much money. Meanwhile, much of this large, unbanked population used Chinese apps like WeChat and AliPay on a daily basis.
So, the thinking was, what if all that data could be used to create alternative credit scores? Eight private companies were selected to do just that as part of a pilot project. The most famous was “Sesame Credit”, an optional service that gave users a three-digit score.
The second and larger focus of “social credit” was centered around trust.
Ironically, while outsiders view China as a tightly-controlled, closely-monitored police state, many in China saw their country as the “Wild West” — untamed, unregulated, and lacking in consequences.
In 2008, for instance, a company was caught using toxic chemicals in its milk and baby formula, making thousands of children sick. Scandals like these left deep nationwide scars. Some parents are — understandably — still suspicious of Chinese milk today. At the same time, corruption — once tolerated as a necessary ingredient to rapid economic growth — was beginning to reach a boiling point. Not only was the Party losing control of its own members, but the public was starting to take notice. Stories of county bureaucrats driving Lamborghinis, despite their measly official salaries, were attracting a bit too much attention.
And, in the eyes of the Party, all these things were connected. The milk, the corruption… it all represented a crisis of moral failure. One consequence of which was a general lack of trust throughout Chinese society.
The solution was to build what it called, in its typically ambiguous way, a “reputation society”. Remember, this was the architect telling the engineer: “here’s a vaguely-defined problem, now go try and solve it.”
The results were as random and chaotic as you’d expect. What, as a local bureaucrat, are you supposed to do with those instructions? No one knows, and that’s the point. A few dozen cities across China rushed to implement their own “social credit” reputation systems, each with their own set of rules and rewards.
One city announced it would subtract 3 points for every five cigarettes smoked and add 5 for every 15,000 steps walked. No explanation was offered for how these numbers were determined, much less how this could possibly be enforced, but it didn’t matter. The public backlash was so strong that the proposal was abandoned. Bizarrely, another city said it would penalize drunk driving and reward volunteer work, but then decided to make the system optional. A third city gave every citizen a grade from A to D, until someone compared it to the Japanese Occupation of China and it quietly disappeared.
It was all very weird and impractical. Needless to say, the Central government was… thoroughly unimpressed. Evidently, the construction didn’t match the blueprint. Alternatively, perhaps Beijing miscalculated the public’s reaction and saw its opportunity to swoop in and ‘protect’ the country from those terrible, no-good engineers. The People’s Bank of China refused to renew the licenses of all eight companies participating in the financial pilot project. Beijing also called out several local governments for being overzealous, instructing them to only punish what was already illegal.
The third and final component of social credit are blacklists.
Previously, each government ministry maintained separate records, meaning someone could violate the rules of, say, the tax authorities, without the food inspector knowing. Now they’re supposed to share that data, not only internally but also with the public, so, for example, you could search the name of a company and decide if it’s reputable. Generally trustworthy entities are placed on so-called “red-lists” and repeat offenders on blacklists.
Most of these are companies, though their owners and managers can be implicated too. As a ballpark, somewhere between about 1 and 2% of companies and 0.15 to 0.3% of people are blacklisted each year. In the most extreme case, offenders are banned from taking flights or trains, or sending their children to private schools.
But these restrictions only apply to one type of offense, those who refuse to pay damages found by a judge, despite having the requisite funds. Once they’ve fulfilled their court orders, they’re removed from the blacklist. By 2018, over 12 million of these “judgment defaulters” had been affected. Some cities even broadcast their names in movie theaters.
Okay, let’s review… One part of “social credit” was “financial”, one about cities incentivizing “good behavior”, and the third an attempt to share government data. The first involved eight companies, the second, dozens of different cities, and the third, several independent ministries. One was private, the other two, public. Some were optional, others not.
Together, they have very little in common besides the label “social credit”. If you’re not at least slightly confused by now, you should probably be concerned. Remember, this was not designed for global comprehension. Actually, it wasn’t really designed for local comprehension. It was designed to leave the door open for experimentation and to retain some plausible deniability for the central government.
So, it should be no surprise that virtually every detail was lost on the media.
Instead of three separate projects, many journalists lumped them all together as one. The inputs of privately-owned Sesame Credit — your shopping behavior, for instance — were paired with the state-sponsored punishments of the entirely separate blacklists — travel restrictions, for example. Thus, the story became “if you buy the wrong things, the CCP will ban you from travel”. “Social credit” was an easy device through which to conceive of and critique Chinese authoritarianism.
The irony being that the reason this 1984-style surveillance was so believable in the first place is also the reason the Party doesn’t need it. Chinese surveillance isn’t some new development. The battle for anonymity was lost well before the birth of social credit. All accounts on all Chinese websites require real-name registration. So does every SIM card, and internet cafe. If and when laws — including social credit — are weaponized, it’s because of the underlying system — the nearly unchecked discretion afforded to individual police officers and bureaucrats.
Now, it would be clean and simple to end the video here by concluding that journalists are just ‘lazy’ and ran with a false narrative. But that too would be lazy.
This is not just a case of journalists seeing what they wanted to see. Because China also feeds into these pre-existing anxieties. To see how, humor me with one final tangent.
In democracies, ‘politics’ seem to get in the way of simple solutions to healthcare, education, and infrastructure. When Congress can’t seem to get anything done, it’s easy to start thinking of party politics as a bug, not a feature. “If only I were General Secretary for a day, everything would be so much better”. If democracy is messy, inefficient, and complicated, autocracy must be clean, efficient, and simple.
But not necessarily. If you’re a student, think about the last time you tried to herd the sheep that were the members of your group project. If you work in an office, recall how difficult it is to get sales and finance to collaborate. Now multiply that complexity by 100 million people — the size of the Communist Party. Though they may march under the same banner, people are people. 100 million members means 100 million feuds, allegiances, and career ambitions. By delegating power in order to share responsibility, China opens the door to a certain version of messy politics.
Both the local governments and private companies responsible for implementing Beijing’s vision of “social credit” had their own incentives, one of which was to overstate their capabilities. If you think Silicon Valley is the capital of empty buzzwords, try talking to executives at Alibaba or Party officials from up-and-coming cities like Suzhou. Desperate to impress their bosses in Beijing, they throw around terms like “big data”, “blockchain”, and “smart cities” like it’s no one’s business.
Take Sesame Credit, for instance. To curry favor with the authorities, the company painted a beautiful picture full of super advanced algorithms. To entice users, it advertised powerful benefits like travel visas to Europe.
The English-language media, already believing Sesame Credit to be the official manifestation of “social credit”, effectively bought into this marketing, which it then resold to a global audience by emphasizing how this “super advanced” technology could be weaponized.
In reality, Sesame Credit was a — frankly amateur — version of the Target RedCard — it calculated how often, not what you purchased, whether you’d completed your profile, not what it said, and how many accounts you’d added on the app as “friends”, not who they were. In exchange for sharing this basic data with the company, you could do things like rent a bike without leaving a deposit. A high score couldn’t grant you a visa to Europe — only Europe can do that. All it could do is help prove your finances, replacing one of several documents required to apply.
Likewise, local governments love nebulous terms like “social credit” because unlike, say, GDP growth, it’s very hard to measure.
This lack of oversight makes it all too easy to exaggerate claims about “algorithms” — which often meant simple addition and subtraction — and “big data” — which was often recorded on spreadsheets, or in one city, I kid you not, clipboards.
This, for instance, is the average number of data points per citizen in each of these five pilot cities (graph showing the number of entries being 0 to less than 2 data points per person). The social credit dystopia imagined by many, on the other hand, would require close coordination between hundreds of different ministries — all of which are competing for promotions, budget allocations, and regulatory authority.
This is not at all to say China is incapable of doing big and scary things. The point is that we should approach its claims about “big data” and “machine learning” with the same degree of skepticism as we would any Silicon Valley startup.
Currently, one side is primed to see China as ten-feet tall and the other is incentivized to exaggerate its height — what could go wrong?
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Yes. Yes, yes, yes! I spent a few years in Beijing and arrived right around when the social credit story was blowing up in the US (again). A lot of people I talked to back home had this idea that...
And yet, ask a friend, colleague, or classmate who’s spent time in China about their experience and you’ll likely be met with confusion ... Because, for all its well-documented, genuine atrocities, the “Orwellian” credit score system imagined by many in the media simply doesn’t exist.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes! I spent a few years in Beijing and arrived right around when the social credit story was blowing up in the US (again). A lot of people I talked to back home had this idea that there was a Black Mirror type of rating system and any little social faux pas would be documented and held against you by the horrible, watchful eye of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. One of the most common questions I got from friends and family in my first few months there was, "Are people worried about their social credit score?" After not hearing or seeing anything remotely out of the ordinary, I started asking some of my Chinese friends and coworkers and they looked at my like I had lost my mind. It's just one of the many, many misconceptions Americans have about China.
Now, it would be clean and simple to end the video here by concluding that journalists are just ‘lazy’ and ran with a false narrative. But that too would be lazy.
There's plenty of truth in what he go on to say, but I think he's also giving too much grace to American/Western media. The misreporting on the social credit system is just one of countless examples of inaccurate reporting that is (in my opinion) unfairly negative/critical towards China. I ended up leaving (getting locked out) in 2020, and if it weren't for the fact that I had direct contact with dozens of people living in China, I would have had no idea what was going on there because of how distorted the reporting on China is in the American press.
This is a nice transcript format. What tool do you use? We usually quote the main points of an article rather than copying full articles though, to avoid getting Tildes into copyright trouble....
This is a nice transcript format. What tool do you use?
We usually quote the main points of an article rather than copying full articles though, to avoid getting Tildes into copyright trouble. That should probably go for YouTube videos too? An alternative might be to post the transcript somewhere else and link to it.
A nice thing about selective quoting is that it better gets across why you thought the link was interesting for people who like to skim.
Yeah I thought about selective quoting too, the problem is sometimes people respond based on the quote alone and out of context, RTFA can only go so far. So this is experiment to see if its...
Yeah I thought about selective quoting too, the problem is sometimes people respond based on the quote alone and out of context, RTFA can only go so far. So this is experiment to see if its possible to have a format where its both easy to skim the main points and without loosing the details. Copyright is a concern though like you said so I'll need to rethink this.
As for tool I used this one, nothing special really just found by googling, then I added paragraph breaks and 'details' tags by hands.
Whisper has a great reputation, but that's only one part of the problem and it's not clear who's best at drawing the rest of the owl. I don't actually want a transcript, I want a summary. Kagi's...
Whisper has a great reputation, but that's only one part of the problem and it's not clear who's best at drawing the rest of the owl. I don't actually want a transcript, I want a summary.
Kagi's universal summarizer seemed to do a decent job, but you need a subscription for it now. Maybe I'll get one eventually.
I found it disappointing that Bard can't summarize YouTube videos, given that it's the same company.
thank you very much for the transcript! (and link to the tool used) I consume a fair bit of China/HongKong news and commentary, so it's nice and refreshing to see English speaking journalism that...
thank you very much for the transcript! (and link to the tool used)
I consume a fair bit of China/HongKong news and commentary, so it's nice and refreshing to see English speaking journalism that weights in on the gross dirty bits, without giving in to the "rar rar communism bad" nonsense.
The video mentioned nebulous government speak: it is gibberish to native Chinese speakers as well.
Recent example. Most Hong Kongers know Ms Diana Pang (彭丹) as a 90's adult film star, famous for her strongly-mandarin-accented-Cantonese, her wearing skimpy/tight outfits in media appearance, and her acrobatic-flexibility that she likes to show off. Recently, she's been appointed by the Party as 國際經濟戰略研究院院長
What does that title mean? By literal interpretation, it's "international" - "economics" - "strategic" - "research center" - "center president".
Sounds fancy, but the "research center" was established about 6 months before she got the job. She has no prior experience as a diplomat, economist, or researcher. Nobody is thinking she's somehow part of the official diplomat party to, say, US, or that she's in the military or doing any sort of serious research. It's a title to "something".
In contrast, the ex-Chief Executive of HK, who made communicated decisions about the fate of 7 million citizens of HK during the 2019 protests, is "江蘇省香港商會名譽會長" -- Jiangsu Province - Hong Kong Commerce Committee - Honorary Committee Chair. She's not expected to actually do anything about HK anymore, and I doubt anybody in Jiangsu would actually go consult with her for anything related to their province. It's just a title to "something".
So what these positions actually oversee is anyone's guess. When "backed" by the will of higher ups, either could command some power and be part of decision makers etc, but when inconvenient, anyone can say well that's not the role of these titles. Everything is vague. About the only thing you could guess, though, is that one is probably a rising star within the party, and the other is not.
Fascinating, thank you for sharing some inside perspective. If it's convenient to share, can I ask if there's any local gossip about why Ms Diana Pang got that title? Seems kinda out of left field.
Fascinating, thank you for sharing some inside perspective. If it's convenient to share, can I ask if there's any local gossip about why Ms Diana Pang got that title? Seems kinda out of left field.
self correction: official English name of the institute is "Institute for International Economic Strategy" per their press release and English title of Chairwoman. Example of how understanding of...
self correction: official English name of the institute is "Institute for International Economic Strategy" per their press release and English title of Chairwoman. Example of how understanding of the Chinese language serving no advantage in understanding what Chinese red-tape speak means.
While Erina (繪麗奈), the first Japanese AV actress from Hong Kong, is just recently appearing on the scene, in fact, many old school HK centerfold-stars (艷星)¹ are each forging their own legendary paths. After the transition of last-gen centerfold-star Tina Leung (狄娜)² into weapons dealer, successfully brokering the deal to purchase Italian guided missiles, this "bombshell for bombshell" (B2B) model is further put into widespread use. Currently 50, known for her atheletic/flexible poses in the 90s, with classic films such as [...], Ms Diana Pang has also, in the flash of an eye, transformed into "Famed Chinese Political Science Scholar", "Folk Diplomat", "Institute for International Economic Strategy chairwoman" and was "instrumental" in the establishment of relations between China and Honduras. What path did "President Pang" take to arrive here?
Too long and in foreign language: family connections to party central figures going back generations; a state scholarship (US) Juliard dance grad; HK film career; being appointed to increasingly important party positions such as "All-China Youth Federation Standing Committee member"; became consultant to TIENS conglomerate {nutritional supplies, logistics, fintech, real estate, bio tech} whose biggest clients are (interestingly) based in Russia. The conglomerate is owned by the richest man in Tianjian (population 13m) who got his start from oil in Northern China, likely risen after the collapse of the USSR. No idea what her role as consultant actually means. Anyway the conglomerate's non-profit branches own schools : vocational high school --> technical institute --> , hiring Ms Pang as chairwoman, with former UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon in attendance at the opening ceremony in Nov 2022. So technically it's "privately owned", but implied as "state backed", much like the linked video's Sesame example. Also note worthy that her tour to Honduras comes around the same time as Honduras cut ties with Taiwan (Mar 2023). This is reminiscent of Nicaragua (Dec 2021) cutting ties with Taiwan incidentally after a "Hong Kong" shell company "invests" in their infrastructure, and Panama (2017) doing the same. Ms Pang's involvement seems to follow well trodden footsteps in non-official-but-with-plausible-deniability-state-supported strategy of China's expanding influence upon the world.
¹ poor translator's note: not sure how to translate 艷星. Google suggested porn star, but it's not right. It's more like someone who makes some mature audience films/shows/photography collections that sell sexiness and invites men to stare, but it doesn't necessarily have to be pornography either. It's entirely possible for a 艷星 to have a full career without ever appearing fully nude on screen, without love scenes with partners, and to be invited to family oriented variety shows and appear on day time television. 艷星 would usually be the terminology of choice for more gentile newspapers, giving a nod to the sexy side of their business brand, without insulting the star or explicit moral judgement. I'm not familiar with the US parlance for something like that, so I went with "Centerfold" featured ladies, but for films. )
² Chinese language interview with Ms Leung, on her involvement with EGNOS, sat-nav and aerospace industry - the Italy thing is a whole other rabbithole. Long story short she knew a lot of people and had a lengthy career as a business woman somehow and is called the "Mother of China's National Defense Navigation" by state backed media even today. Can't find sources on the Italy deal - citations probably in Professor Shen's Patreon membership only full article.
Oh God this is something I didn't know I needed from Tildes. It's so hard to find information on China that acknowledges the atrocities it's committing in places like Xinjiang but also looks...
Oh God this is something I didn't know I needed from Tildes. It's so hard to find information on China that acknowledges the atrocities it's committing in places like Xinjiang but also looks critically at the absolutely absurd lens news about China is put through in the US. Reddit was a dumpsterfire in this regard and it's so refreshing to see some actually balanced coverage on something like this.
I always feel like this about North Korea. It's obviously a horrible place to live, and their outward/public face is aggressively stagemanaged - but some of western North Korea coverage is so...
I always feel like this about North Korea. It's obviously a horrible place to live, and their outward/public face is aggressively stagemanaged - but some of western North Korea coverage is so obviously and blatantly made up that it's hard to know what to believe when you read it. Especially here in the UK, there seems to be a cottage industry of "well, we don't know much about this country, so we can just make up cartoon villain junk about it and people will just lap it up". As a result I feel like nobody really knows what's going on there and it makes the plight of the people there into the butt of a joke. Kinda disgusting really.
You may also like The China Project, which is not afraid to report on the dirty bits but also doesn’t get swept up in the wild anti-China angle of many western outlets.
You may also like The China Project, which is not afraid to report on the dirty bits but also doesn’t get swept up in the wild anti-China angle of many western outlets.
If you have Nebula, polymatter also did a video series called China, actually which covers the ways censorship actually works, why China can't get any allies and their poverty statistics among...
If you have Nebula, polymatter also did a video series called China, actually which covers the ways censorship actually works, why China can't get any allies and their poverty statistics among other things.
I also quite like their YouTube series China's Reckoning which is a lot more focused on future issues China could face.
Transcript:
China “appears to be… construct[ing] the ultimate tool of social control”… a “comprehensive ‘credit score’ system”… that will “make your head spin.”
That’s what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote on October 5th, 2015.
This newly emerging, soon to be all-encompassing surveillance network, it said, would give everyone in China a score between 350 and 950. But unlike, say, American credit scores, these would punish everything from jaywalking to government criticism. Even more disturbingly, you could be responsible for the actions of friends and family.
The rest of this article mainly focused on the United States. The ACLU, after all, is an American non-profit. It lobbies for things like free speech, privacy, and criminal justice reform. This was not new reporting. The author was open about his sources — other articles he had read online. Neither did he claim any expertise on China. In fact, just three days later, he updated the article, softening the tone and emphasizing that he only meant to caution against “potential abuses” in America.
But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that a high-profile, well-respected institution had stamped its seal of approval and other organizations took notice. Two days after the original ACLU article went live and a day before it issued the update, Computerworld re-published it, calling the Chinese system “Orwellian”. Popular Science wrote that although, quote, “the system isn’t explicitly dystopian yet… it has all the pieces to be dystopian at a moment’s notice.” And Reason claimed these scores would soon “define Chinese citizens' lives”. In less than a week, the Social Credit System had not only entered the English-media landscape, but also, seemingly, amassed a body of evidence. Multiple sources endorsing the same alarming conclusion. Never mind that they all referenced the same ACLU report written by a non-expert, largely about the United States, itself based on earlier speculation.
News travels fast. And headlines even faster. There was no need for some grand conspiracy to smear China or bad faith on the part of any individual author. The simple market pressures of 21st-century journalism were enough to make a story appear out of thin air. America’s (often quite justified) suspicion of the Chinese government and technology in general, were just icing on the cake. Since then, the social credit system has truly taken on a life of its own, with coverage by the Financial Times, Economist, Fortune, and countless others. This now eight year-old game of telephone culminated in an appearance at the White House, with Vice President Mike Pence describing it as “an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life.”
And yet, ask a friend, colleague, or classmate who’s spent time in China about their experience and you’ll likely be met with confusion.
This is not a case of censorship. The Chinese government does engage in extensive censorship, but for the social credit system to work as described, the public must be, at a minimum, aware of its existence. Neither is this the result of propaganda. The government does engage in propaganda, but in this case, the response is not anger, frustration, or disagreement — just confusion.
Because, for all its well-documented, genuine atrocities, the “Orwellian” credit score system imagined by many in the media simply doesn’t exist. The truth, however, is far more revealing.
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Sponsored by Skillshare. Get a one-month free trial and start learning everything from programming to graphic design.In June 2014, the State Council of China published this “Planning Outline for the Establishment of a Social Credit System”.
Now, the first thing you should know about this document is that it’s incredibly boring and almost artfully vague. Full of dense phrases like “Promote the improvement of legal person governance”, you almost have to admire how little it manages to say in 16,000 Chinese characters.
The second thing to note is the broader context in which it was released. One month earlier, in May of 2014, the same government announced what it described as a “war on terror” against violent extremism in Xinjiang. This would later evolve into a full-blown attack on Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities including mass incarceration, surveillance, and violence that continues, in modified form, to this day.
In other words, this was a time when much of the world was becoming — understandably — increasingly skeptical of the Chinese government, and here was this new, suspiciously ambiguous notion of “social credit”. The motive for some kind of inescapable system of surveillance and control seemed undeniable.
In fact, what made the myth so potent was that it did contain an element of truth. In the years since, China has constructed a similarly oppressive, albeit less high-tech, police state in Xinjiang, involving DNA collection, phone searches, and security checkpoints.
Besides, what else could the term “social credit” refer to? And if it truly had nothing to hide, why was the plan written in such cryptic language?
But what few casual observers understood is that cryptic, inscrutable Leninist-steeped jargon is kind of the Chinese Communist Party’s whole thing. And there’s a very specific reason.
The benefits of autocracy for an autocrat are so obvious — complete, unchecked authority — that it’s easy to forget the trade-off. With complete authority comes complete responsibility. There’s no one to blame. Consider how often Democrats and Republicans use each other as scapegoats. Dictators don’t have that luxury. So, to insulate themselves from criticism, they often delegate a lot more power than you might expect.
Now, make no mistake, Beijing always gets the final word, but think of it as an architect. It produces the national blueprint, first in the form of a policy document, and later, a policy outline, but whose actual implementation it outsources to lower levels of government — its engineers. When the actual building looks nothing like the concept art, the central government can keep its hands clean by pointing to its beautifully vague, boringly-unobjectionable sketches. At the same time, it also, of course, has things it wants to accomplish — things that need to be communicated to the ‘engineers’.
Thus, while these policy documents, as we saw, are indeed horribly tedious, they’re not entirely devoid of content. You just have to understand Party-speak.
So, what did it mean by “social credit”?
According to Jeremy Daum, Senior Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and someone fluent in Party-speak, it was never a single policy. It wasn’t even a very well-outlined goal. Instead, it was always, quote, “shorthand for a broad range of efforts”.
The first of which was financial.
In short, the millions born before the One-Child Policy became law in 1980 were in their prime working-age years during the Chinese boom of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. That large mass of workers kept labor costs down, attracting foreign companies, who, in turn, invested that profit back into the country. But, as all those workers began to retire, Chinese labor became a lot more expensive, leading to lower profits, and therefore, less investment. That investment, however, could be replaced with consumption.
In summary: if China was to keep growing, it needed to start spending. Yet, at the time, just one-fifth of the population had a credit report. Without banks or credit cards, they couldn’t take out loans. And without loans, they couldn’t spend as much money. Meanwhile, much of this large, unbanked population used Chinese apps like WeChat and AliPay on a daily basis.
So, the thinking was, what if all that data could be used to create alternative credit scores? Eight private companies were selected to do just that as part of a pilot project. The most famous was “Sesame Credit”, an optional service that gave users a three-digit score.
The second and larger focus of “social credit” was centered around trust.
Ironically, while outsiders view China as a tightly-controlled, closely-monitored police state, many in China saw their country as the “Wild West” — untamed, unregulated, and lacking in consequences.
In 2008, for instance, a company was caught using toxic chemicals in its milk and baby formula, making thousands of children sick. Scandals like these left deep nationwide scars. Some parents are — understandably — still suspicious of Chinese milk today. At the same time, corruption — once tolerated as a necessary ingredient to rapid economic growth — was beginning to reach a boiling point. Not only was the Party losing control of its own members, but the public was starting to take notice. Stories of county bureaucrats driving Lamborghinis, despite their measly official salaries, were attracting a bit too much attention.
And, in the eyes of the Party, all these things were connected. The milk, the corruption… it all represented a crisis of moral failure. One consequence of which was a general lack of trust throughout Chinese society.
The solution was to build what it called, in its typically ambiguous way, a “reputation society”. Remember, this was the architect telling the engineer: “here’s a vaguely-defined problem, now go try and solve it.”
The results were as random and chaotic as you’d expect. What, as a local bureaucrat, are you supposed to do with those instructions? No one knows, and that’s the point. A few dozen cities across China rushed to implement their own “social credit” reputation systems, each with their own set of rules and rewards.
One city announced it would subtract 3 points for every five cigarettes smoked and add 5 for every 15,000 steps walked. No explanation was offered for how these numbers were determined, much less how this could possibly be enforced, but it didn’t matter. The public backlash was so strong that the proposal was abandoned. Bizarrely, another city said it would penalize drunk driving and reward volunteer work, but then decided to make the system optional. A third city gave every citizen a grade from A to D, until someone compared it to the Japanese Occupation of China and it quietly disappeared.
It was all very weird and impractical. Needless to say, the Central government was… thoroughly unimpressed. Evidently, the construction didn’t match the blueprint. Alternatively, perhaps Beijing miscalculated the public’s reaction and saw its opportunity to swoop in and ‘protect’ the country from those terrible, no-good engineers. The People’s Bank of China refused to renew the licenses of all eight companies participating in the financial pilot project. Beijing also called out several local governments for being overzealous, instructing them to only punish what was already illegal.
The third and final component of social credit are blacklists.
Previously, each government ministry maintained separate records, meaning someone could violate the rules of, say, the tax authorities, without the food inspector knowing. Now they’re supposed to share that data, not only internally but also with the public, so, for example, you could search the name of a company and decide if it’s reputable. Generally trustworthy entities are placed on so-called “red-lists” and repeat offenders on blacklists.
Most of these are companies, though their owners and managers can be implicated too. As a ballpark, somewhere between about 1 and 2% of companies and 0.15 to 0.3% of people are blacklisted each year. In the most extreme case, offenders are banned from taking flights or trains, or sending their children to private schools.
But these restrictions only apply to one type of offense, those who refuse to pay damages found by a judge, despite having the requisite funds. Once they’ve fulfilled their court orders, they’re removed from the blacklist. By 2018, over 12 million of these “judgment defaulters” had been affected. Some cities even broadcast their names in movie theaters.
Okay, let’s review… One part of “social credit” was “financial”, one about cities incentivizing “good behavior”, and the third an attempt to share government data. The first involved eight companies, the second, dozens of different cities, and the third, several independent ministries. One was private, the other two, public. Some were optional, others not.
Together, they have very little in common besides the label “social credit”. If you’re not at least slightly confused by now, you should probably be concerned. Remember, this was not designed for global comprehension. Actually, it wasn’t really designed for local comprehension. It was designed to leave the door open for experimentation and to retain some plausible deniability for the central government.
So, it should be no surprise that virtually every detail was lost on the media.
Instead of three separate projects, many journalists lumped them all together as one. The inputs of privately-owned Sesame Credit — your shopping behavior, for instance — were paired with the state-sponsored punishments of the entirely separate blacklists — travel restrictions, for example. Thus, the story became “if you buy the wrong things, the CCP will ban you from travel”. “Social credit” was an easy device through which to conceive of and critique Chinese authoritarianism.
The irony being that the reason this 1984-style surveillance was so believable in the first place is also the reason the Party doesn’t need it. Chinese surveillance isn’t some new development. The battle for anonymity was lost well before the birth of social credit. All accounts on all Chinese websites require real-name registration. So does every SIM card, and internet cafe. If and when laws — including social credit — are weaponized, it’s because of the underlying system — the nearly unchecked discretion afforded to individual police officers and bureaucrats.
Now, it would be clean and simple to end the video here by concluding that journalists are just ‘lazy’ and ran with a false narrative. But that too would be lazy.
This is not just a case of journalists seeing what they wanted to see. Because China also feeds into these pre-existing anxieties. To see how, humor me with one final tangent.
In democracies, ‘politics’ seem to get in the way of simple solutions to healthcare, education, and infrastructure. When Congress can’t seem to get anything done, it’s easy to start thinking of party politics as a bug, not a feature. “If only I were General Secretary for a day, everything would be so much better”. If democracy is messy, inefficient, and complicated, autocracy must be clean, efficient, and simple.
But not necessarily. If you’re a student, think about the last time you tried to herd the sheep that were the members of your group project. If you work in an office, recall how difficult it is to get sales and finance to collaborate. Now multiply that complexity by 100 million people — the size of the Communist Party. Though they may march under the same banner, people are people. 100 million members means 100 million feuds, allegiances, and career ambitions. By delegating power in order to share responsibility, China opens the door to a certain version of messy politics.
Both the local governments and private companies responsible for implementing Beijing’s vision of “social credit” had their own incentives, one of which was to overstate their capabilities. If you think Silicon Valley is the capital of empty buzzwords, try talking to executives at Alibaba or Party officials from up-and-coming cities like Suzhou. Desperate to impress their bosses in Beijing, they throw around terms like “big data”, “blockchain”, and “smart cities” like it’s no one’s business.
Take Sesame Credit, for instance. To curry favor with the authorities, the company painted a beautiful picture full of super advanced algorithms. To entice users, it advertised powerful benefits like travel visas to Europe.
The English-language media, already believing Sesame Credit to be the official manifestation of “social credit”, effectively bought into this marketing, which it then resold to a global audience by emphasizing how this “super advanced” technology could be weaponized.
In reality, Sesame Credit was a — frankly amateur — version of the Target RedCard — it calculated how often, not what you purchased, whether you’d completed your profile, not what it said, and how many accounts you’d added on the app as “friends”, not who they were. In exchange for sharing this basic data with the company, you could do things like rent a bike without leaving a deposit. A high score couldn’t grant you a visa to Europe — only Europe can do that. All it could do is help prove your finances, replacing one of several documents required to apply.
Likewise, local governments love nebulous terms like “social credit” because unlike, say, GDP growth, it’s very hard to measure.
This lack of oversight makes it all too easy to exaggerate claims about “algorithms” — which often meant simple addition and subtraction — and “big data” — which was often recorded on spreadsheets, or in one city, I kid you not, clipboards.
This, for instance, is the average number of data points per citizen in each of these five pilot cities (graph showing the number of entries being 0 to less than 2 data points per person). The social credit dystopia imagined by many, on the other hand, would require close coordination between hundreds of different ministries — all of which are competing for promotions, budget allocations, and regulatory authority.
This is not at all to say China is incapable of doing big and scary things. The point is that we should approach its claims about “big data” and “machine learning” with the same degree of skepticism as we would any Silicon Valley startup.
Currently, one side is primed to see China as ten-feet tall and the other is incentivized to exaggerate its height — what could go wrong?
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Yes. Yes, yes, yes! I spent a few years in Beijing and arrived right around when the social credit story was blowing up in the US (again). A lot of people I talked to back home had this idea that there was a Black Mirror type of rating system and any little social faux pas would be documented and held against you by the horrible, watchful eye of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. One of the most common questions I got from friends and family in my first few months there was, "Are people worried about their social credit score?" After not hearing or seeing anything remotely out of the ordinary, I started asking some of my Chinese friends and coworkers and they looked at my like I had lost my mind. It's just one of the many, many misconceptions Americans have about China.
There's plenty of truth in what he go on to say, but I think he's also giving too much grace to American/Western media. The misreporting on the social credit system is just one of countless examples of inaccurate reporting that is (in my opinion) unfairly negative/critical towards China. I ended up leaving (getting locked out) in 2020, and if it weren't for the fact that I had direct contact with dozens of people living in China, I would have had no idea what was going on there because of how distorted the reporting on China is in the American press.
This is a nice transcript format. What tool do you use?
We usually quote the main points of an article rather than copying full articles though, to avoid getting Tildes into copyright trouble. That should probably go for YouTube videos too? An alternative might be to post the transcript somewhere else and link to it.
A nice thing about selective quoting is that it better gets across why you thought the link was interesting for people who like to skim.
Yeah I thought about selective quoting too, the problem is sometimes people respond based on the quote alone and out of context, RTFA can only go so far. So this is experiment to see if its possible to have a format where its both easy to skim the main points and without loosing the details. Copyright is a concern though like you said so I'll need to rethink this.
As for tool I used this one, nothing special really just found by googling, then I added paragraph breaks and 'details' tags by hands.
It's definitely Whisper. You can run it locally really easily, and a ton of free online transcription sites sprung up after it was released.
Whisper has a great reputation, but that's only one part of the problem and it's not clear who's best at drawing the rest of the owl. I don't actually want a transcript, I want a summary.
Kagi's universal summarizer seemed to do a decent job, but you need a subscription for it now. Maybe I'll get one eventually.
I found it disappointing that Bard can't summarize YouTube videos, given that it's the same company.
thank you very much for the transcript! (and link to the tool used)
I consume a fair bit of China/HongKong news and commentary, so it's nice and refreshing to see English speaking journalism that weights in on the gross dirty bits, without giving in to the "rar rar communism bad" nonsense.
The video mentioned nebulous government speak: it is gibberish to native Chinese speakers as well.
Recent example. Most Hong Kongers know Ms Diana Pang (彭丹) as a 90's adult film star, famous for her strongly-mandarin-accented-Cantonese, her wearing skimpy/tight outfits in media appearance, and her acrobatic-flexibility that she likes to show off. Recently, she's been appointed by the Party as 國際經濟戰略研究院院長
What does that title mean? By literal interpretation, it's "international" - "economics" - "strategic" - "research center" - "center president".
Sounds fancy, but the "research center" was established about 6 months before she got the job. She has no prior experience as a diplomat, economist, or researcher. Nobody is thinking she's somehow part of the official diplomat party to, say, US, or that she's in the military or doing any sort of serious research. It's a title to "something".
In contrast, the ex-Chief Executive of HK, who
madecommunicated decisions about the fate of 7 million citizens of HK during the 2019 protests, is "江蘇省香港商會名譽會長" -- Jiangsu Province - Hong Kong Commerce Committee - Honorary Committee Chair. She's not expected to actually do anything about HK anymore, and I doubt anybody in Jiangsu would actually go consult with her for anything related to their province. It's just a title to "something".So what these positions actually oversee is anyone's guess. When "backed" by the will of higher ups, either could command some power and be part of decision makers etc, but when inconvenient, anyone can say well that's not the role of these titles. Everything is vague. About the only thing you could guess, though, is that one is probably a rising star within the party, and the other is not.
Fascinating, thank you for sharing some inside perspective. If it's convenient to share, can I ask if there's any local gossip about why Ms Diana Pang got that title? Seems kinda out of left field.
self correction: official English name of the institute is "Institute for International Economic Strategy" per their press release and English title of Chairwoman. Example of how understanding of the Chinese language serving no advantage in understanding what Chinese red-tape speak means.
Video analysis from poly-sci professor Simon Shen:
Too long and in foreign language: family connections to party central figures going back generations; a state scholarship (US) Juliard dance grad; HK film career; being appointed to increasingly important party positions such as "All-China Youth Federation Standing Committee member"; became consultant to TIENS conglomerate {nutritional supplies, logistics, fintech, real estate, bio tech} whose biggest clients are (interestingly) based in Russia. The conglomerate is owned by the richest man in Tianjian (population 13m) who got his start from oil in Northern China, likely risen after the collapse of the USSR. No idea what her role as consultant actually means. Anyway the conglomerate's non-profit branches own schools : vocational high school --> technical institute --> , hiring Ms Pang as chairwoman, with former UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon in attendance at the opening ceremony in Nov 2022. So technically it's "privately owned", but implied as "state backed", much like the linked video's Sesame example. Also note worthy that her tour to Honduras comes around the same time as Honduras cut ties with Taiwan (Mar 2023). This is reminiscent of Nicaragua (Dec 2021) cutting ties with Taiwan incidentally after a "Hong Kong" shell company "invests" in their infrastructure, and Panama (2017) doing the same. Ms Pang's involvement seems to follow well trodden footsteps in non-official-but-with-plausible-deniability-state-supported strategy of China's expanding influence upon the world.
¹ poor translator's note: not sure how to translate 艷星. Google suggested porn star, but it's not right. It's more like someone who makes some mature audience films/shows/photography collections that sell sexiness and invites men to stare, but it doesn't necessarily have to be pornography either. It's entirely possible for a 艷星 to have a full career without ever appearing fully nude on screen, without love scenes with partners, and to be invited to family oriented variety shows and appear on day time television. 艷星 would usually be the terminology of choice for more gentile newspapers, giving a nod to the sexy side of their business brand, without insulting the star or explicit moral judgement. I'm not familiar with the US parlance for something like that, so I went with "Centerfold" featured ladies, but for films. )
² Chinese language interview with Ms Leung, on her involvement with EGNOS, sat-nav and aerospace industry - the Italy thing is a whole other rabbithole. Long story short she knew a lot of people and had a lengthy career as a business woman somehow and is called the "Mother of China's National Defense Navigation" by state backed media even today. Can't find sources on the Italy deal - citations probably in Professor Shen's Patreon membership only full article.
Oh God this is something I didn't know I needed from Tildes. It's so hard to find information on China that acknowledges the atrocities it's committing in places like Xinjiang but also looks critically at the absolutely absurd lens news about China is put through in the US. Reddit was a dumpsterfire in this regard and it's so refreshing to see some actually balanced coverage on something like this.
I always feel like this about North Korea. It's obviously a horrible place to live, and their outward/public face is aggressively stagemanaged - but some of western North Korea coverage is so obviously and blatantly made up that it's hard to know what to believe when you read it. Especially here in the UK, there seems to be a cottage industry of "well, we don't know much about this country, so we can just make up cartoon villain junk about it and people will just lap it up". As a result I feel like nobody really knows what's going on there and it makes the plight of the people there into the butt of a joke. Kinda disgusting really.
You may also like The China Project, which is not afraid to report on the dirty bits but also doesn’t get swept up in the wild anti-China angle of many western outlets.
If you have Nebula, polymatter also did a video series called China, actually which covers the ways censorship actually works, why China can't get any allies and their poverty statistics among other things.
I also quite like their YouTube series China's Reckoning which is a lot more focused on future issues China could face.