Chapotraphouse

As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.

What actually gets tracked? Primarily court judgment defaults: people who refuse to pay fines or loans despite having the ability. The Supreme People's Court's blacklist is composed of citizens and companies that refuse to comply with court orders, typically to pay fines or repay loans. Some experimental programs in specific cities track broader social behavior, but these remain isolated experiments.

The gap between Western perception and Chinese reality is enormous, and it reveals something important: we're worried about a system that barely exists while ignoring the behavioral scoring systems we actually live with.

Legit, thanks for this. Sometimes the coolness of articles like this revolve around re-framing an already known part of life (cookies and data usage).

Where China's limited experiments have been explicit about scoring criteria, Western systems hide their decision-making processes entirely. Even China's fragmented approach offers more visibility into how behavioral data gets used than our black box algorithms do.

This is true of so many things (especially propaganda itself) about the West vs its Enemies. Honesty is portrayed as heavy-handedness and Western deception is portrayed as being laissez-faire or non-existent. The enemy has over-the-top propaganda and criminalizes dissent. But the US simply drowns out independent media, shuts down or de-prioritizes social media accounts (on platforms it controls!), and criminalizes a hundred things synonymous with dissent.

Maybe I'm in an uncharitable mood but this article feels a little... clumsy?

We go from "the only difference between US and Chinese social credit systems is honesty" to "here are all the multiple differences between these systems"

I also find including both honesty ("Here's why we're doing this") and transparency ("Here's how we're doing it") as concepts without meaningfully distinguishing between them or engaging with them drags the piece down. The latter is the more problematic one for me, especially given the conclusion:

Because for the first time, you'll finally understand the game you've been playing all along. And knowing the rules means you can finally choose whether you want to play.

Didn't we open the piece with credit score, and note how "it affects where you can live, which jobs you can get"? There is no choosing whether or not to engage with credit profiling—even not having a score is engaging with it. And as they point to in the article, even the more peripheral scorings like Uber, Amazon, etc will become increasingly impactful as their systems become more interconnected. That's not to say there's no value in being mindful of how you're scored, but it's not the same thing as being able to opt out.