Life in Rongcheng offers inside preview of China's social credit system, which mixes credit scores with monitoring data of citizens, launches nationally in 2020
Foreign PolicySimina Mistreanu
Context & Ripple Effects
The Rongcheng reporting lands two years into an arc that began when China started [[a:878441|piloting a system that combines citizens' records into a single score governing jobs, loans, and travel]]. What the city adds is granularity: credit scores fused with monitoring data at the level of daily life, offering a working template rather than a policy paper.
The timing matters because enforcement is already hardening — since May 1, infractions like spreading false information can bar people from flights and trains — and because Beijing has separately announced it will rate all of its 22 million residents by end-2020, pooling data from multiple departments ahead of the national launch.
First-order effects
Rongcheng residents now live under a merged score where monitoring data feeds directly into credit standing, making the city a live testbed whose mechanics the 2020 national rollout can copy.
Second-order effects
Transport restrictions on flights and trains give the score real teeth beyond lending and hiring, turning compliance with fines and speech rules into a mobility question.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds toward the reported Renmin Chain effort to share social credit data across platforms and provinces, the system converges from scattered municipal pilots into a single interoperable national infrastructure.
The trend: China's social credit system is moving from isolated city pilots toward a nationally enforced, cross-province data-sharing regime by 2020.
Bc ppl are probably going to respond to this with Orientalist bs framing it as a cultural thing unique to China: we already have various forms of “social credit” that quantify your worth in the US and other places: test scores, IQ score, GPA, credit scores, weight/BMI, etc. http:…
“You can also earn credit by donating to charity” so money can actually buy officially backed trustworthiness now is it just me or is this ... really dystopian and terrifying? http://twitter.com/...
By 2020, the Chinese government has promised to roll out a national social credit system to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” http://foreignpolicy.com/...
China is developing a system to quantify how good of a person you are, boiled down to a single number. Your privileges in society will be determined by your social credit. http://foreignpolicy.com/...
The national credit system planned for 2020 will be an “ecosystem” made up of schemes of various sizes and reaches, run by cities, government ministries, online payment providers, down to... http://foreignpolicy.com/...
China's new social-credit index will make the government the judge of people's social reliability, using its full monitoring and big-data powers, with poor scores putting at risk access to public services and even rights such as travel and education. http://foreignpolicy.com/... …
What life is like inside China's social credit laboratory — where people get points for being model citizens and lose points for misbehaving - via @ForeignPolicy http://www.businessinsider.com/ ... http://twitter.com/...