Jiayang Fan, a staff writer at the New Yorker, describes China’s plan to develop a social credit rating for every one of its citizens.
When she was a child in school in China, children earned red stars for behavior and accomplishment, which were publicly displayed. Now the State proposes a similar though far more complex rating system. The State
”aims to compile a comprehensive national database out of citizens’ fiscal, government, and possibly personal information. First publicized, last year, in a planning document published by the State Council, S.C.S. was billed as “an important component part of the Socialist market-economy system,” underwriting a “harmonious Socialist society.” Its intended goals are “establishing the idea of a sincerity culture, and carrying forward sincerity and traditional virtues,” and its primary objectives are to raise “the honest mentality and credit levels of the entire society” as well as “the over-all competitiveness of the country,” and “stimulating the development of society and the progress of civilization….
“According to the planning document, S.C.S. will be used “to encourage keeping trust and punish breaking trust.” Doctors, teachers, construction firms, scientists, sports figures, N.G.O.s, members of the judicial system, and government administrators will face special scrutiny. It is conceivable that the data generated through smartphones, apps, and online transactions will be marshalled in the service of this overarching and uncomfortably broad aim. More unsettlingly, the algorithm used to calculate the score of an individual or organization might be withheld by the government from the individual herself….
“The opacity of its infrastructure is disquieting. What safeguards will be put in place to prevent the database from being rigged? Will the very corruption that the social-credit system is meant to counter infect the system itself? Who will oversee the overseers of the operation? How will privacy, long under siege in contemporary China, be protected? And will punishment for political discontent be delivered through dismal credit scores? If S.C.S. becomes a mechanism of financial and social integration, it is hard to imagine how it could avoid becoming an instrument of mass surveillance.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Look over there: squirrel!
The US is just as far (if not further) along the way to doing this than China.
In the US, Credit score is already used as a standin for “social rating”, used for loan, job , credit card and even adoption applications (all of which have a social standing aspect)
What safeguards are in place in the US to protect against misuse of credit scores?
Amost none.
What safeguards are even in place to assure the accuracy of the information upon which the credit scores are based?
Almost none.
What safeguards are in place to ensure that inaccuracies can be fixed without having to hire a lawyer and without spending thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours?
Almost none.
What safeguards are in place to ensure that the private information held by credit agencies is not illegally accessed by criminals?
Almost none.
What evidence is there that Congress is doing anything about any of this?
Almost none.
Oh, there’s a lot of talk (by people like Elizabeth Warren) but that’s all it is, talk ( and “indignation”, of course)
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This is nothing new for China. Confucius (551 BC – 479 BC) set the tone centuries before Christ for a society that is harmonious and he dedicated his life to teaching these values that were all based on a harmonious society. The only thing new is adding the word “socialist” in addition to technology and the internet to gather knowledge and weed out any individuals that might rock that harmonious boat.
It was during the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) when Confucianism became the dominant political ideology and the Analects became known by that name. All early versions of this text have been displaced by a version compiled near the end of the Han dynasty.
Simply put, the Han dynasty took the teachings of Confucius and tweaked what he taught to fit a system where all life was harmonious based on obedience and not rocking the boat.
This is no different than what the Catholic Chuch and other Christian religions have done to the original eachings of Jesus Christ.
The Communist Party, just like every leader in China since the Han Dynasty, has realized Confucius might be useful for them again. But the version of Confucius they use isn’t the same as the one in The Analects, his most famous collection of ideas and sayings. Beijing today focuses on the imperial Confucius who was all about obedience to the emperor, hierarchy, and loyalty.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/150325-confucius-china-asia-philosophy-communist-party-ngbooktalk/
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Thanks for the historical context and useful insights. Though nothing new, China is obviously taking the lead in using big data to tie the pendulum of the freedom/privacy nexus at the authoritarian end of its swing. The basic fraud is that even if the data system could do what is claimed of it in terms of social engineering, that success would be a direct threat to the power the leadership has over its people which it will doubtless be unwilling to relinquish, especially to an algorithm, even if they defined its parameters. Will they have a publicly viewable profile like ordinary citizens? Possibly. Will that profile be a fabrication? Without a doubt. Who in their right mind believes that men who have spent their whole lives competing to acquire and excercise power can or will put that all aside in favor of a “leaderless” society? It’s not even real socialism since the individual has no say, no vote on policy, nothing. China is infamous for cram schools, so it’s a very short walk from that to profile improvement gaming as an emerging industry.
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Dam,
You nailed it!!!
My son warned me about this the day I got an EZ Pass tag.
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Best question: Who will oversee the overseers…
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Ha! Ha! Ha!
In China, they watch each other. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution parents feared their own children and the parents went out of their way to make sure they didn’t let their children hear them or see them doing anything that the child might report.
The CCP has more than 80 million members spread throughout the country and they not only watch everyone that is not a party member, but they watch each other for any evidence of behavior or thinking that should be reported.
The Chinese Communist Party is the largest political party in the world.
In fact, there have been incidents (probably not that many) where the media’s own in-house censors hired to make sure everything reported is okay went too far and the top leadership of the CCP had to make a call and request that a censored story be published and broadcast.
The media in China often goes out of its way to avoid being called from the top for running a story that the leaders of the CCP might not like.
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“Out of sight, out of reach”
Who will oversee the overseer
With overseer overseas?
Who watch the mainland fleer
When overseer flees?
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I loved the author’s use of that story about the first graders’ classroom “star chart”…. it’s a metaphor for the whole rate ’em and rank ’em mentality and “yet another lesson in the mysterious volatility of adult discipline.” The classroom chart system ended up being an “object of discontent” and a true inspiration to cheat.
Sort of reminds me of our own “Common Core”, VAM, APPR etc..etc… In that first grade classroom, the ranking system “…had unravelled slowly—and then spectacularly—by the time we got midway through the semester.”
Yeah, just like a plane that someone is trying to “build while flying it.”
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Yes, the old “building a plane while flying it”.
Before school deform came along that was just something someone said to mock an utterly ridiculous process.
Now it is something people not only attempt to do but are proud of attempting!
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Yup, and that sort of self-delusion and parroting of the “party line” is a very real threat right here in our country.
No doubt, essentially external threats like ISIS are evil and very real. But it’s some of our own fellow citizens right here beside us, people who drink this edu-babble kool-aid, for example, that really keep me up at night.
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The basic difference between what is happening in China versus in the US with regard to Social credit rating is that in China, the government is behind it and in the US, corporations are leading the way.
But if people don’t think that the data that Facebook, Google, Amazon, Credit agencies, etc have collected on them will ever be used in the future (by corporations, the government or anyone else) to rate their “social credit”, they had best think again.
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SCARY.
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Gary Shteyngart prophesied this in his scary/hilarioius dystopian novel Super Sad True Love Story.
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Remember China gives away their “girl” babies. The Chinese govt. is simplistic.
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China doesn’t give away abandoned girl babies for free.
This one site estimates the cost runs from almost $30k to more than $43k.
For thousands of years, women were seen as the property of men in China. That changed in one day soon after the Chinese Communist Party came into power. New laws made women equal to men, but changing thousands of years of thinking doesn’t happen just because you pass a law.
It’s taken decades to change the thinking that women are the property of men. That changes took place faster in the cities but much slower in rural areas and the more remote the area, the slower the changes.
Here’s another piece about the top 10 myths about adopting from China
http://holtinternational.org/blog/2014/11/top-10-myths-about-adopting-from-china/
Back in the 1990s, a close Jewish caucasian friend of Anchee Min, with Anchee helping with the translations during the process, adopted a Chinese girl child and brought her home to Chicago where she went to school K-12. After graduating from high school before starting college, the adopted girl went on a biking trip (not motorbikes) with several of her recently graduated high school friends. Our daughter and the adopted girl grew up as close friends in the same house for several years before Anchee left Chicago for California.
That bike trip ended in a horrible tragedy. I wrote about it here. I cried when I was writing about it because Faith was my daughter’s friend and Lauryann flew to Chicago for the funeral and was one of the pallbearers.
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Thanks, Lloyd. So sad.
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