The Chinese Social Credit System
Connections and similarities between Western and China’s mass surveillance - Social Credit System (SCS)
Background and historical facts
Social credit is a tech-enabled way to tie political power to social and economic development that's been discussed in the country since the 1980s, an automation of chairman Mao's mass line — a term to describe how the party's leadership shaped and managed society.
This past statement describes very well how Chinese Communist Party will have the power to label not only Chinese citizens but companies and economic infrastructures and this way keep the power with this tight control on them. This system, that can shape the whole society dramatically, is only possible today in a country like China with its huge population, culture, economic and authoritarian power. An State able to elevate order and control over privacy. hard to imagine in Western countries.
Now, we will expose some of the characteristics of china that make possible the system to be enabled.
In terms of culture and society customs, we shouldn’t disregard the fact that in Chinese the notion of privacy differs from western political and legal thought. Traditional Confucian Philosophy values morality over respect for individual rights as the guiding principle for interpersonal relationships and the government of a society (Huang 2014, 7; wang 2011, 34-53). For this reason, privacy traditionally meant family intimacy or shameful secrets (wang 2011, 34-48). Chinese law, with the exception of instance-specific clauses such as protection against unlawful search or detention, generally treats the right to privacy mostly as a right to preserve one’s reputation against insult and libel (wang 2011, 50-53).
Another historical fact connected with the late modern history and facilitates the implementation of SCS is that Chinese people are no strangers to arbitrary and extended forms of surveillance. since the Mao era, the Chinese government has kept Dang’an, a secret dossier, on millions of its urban residents that maintains influence in the public sector to this day (Jacobs 2015; yang 2011). the information included in the dossier ranges from one’s educational and work performance, family background, and records of self-criticism to mental health conditions, but individuals do not have access to their Dang’an (ibid.). when a completely opaque system like Dang’an has been in place for decades, an intrusive program like the SCS may feel less objectionable to the Chinese public.
Research + Development
This system is partially being tested in the remote region of Xinjiang, where another different culture from the dominant Han culture, the Uighur's, is living but it is trying to be suppressed or at least controlled in a way that many Human Right’s Organisations and observers qualify as illegal.
This “control” is built on the scaffolding of mass surveillance. cameras fill the marketplaces and intersections. recording devices are placed in homes and even in bathrooms. checkpoints that limit the movement of muslims are often outfitted with facial-recognition devices to vacuum up the population’s biometric data, so the region of Xinjiang inhabit by Uighur's is a becoming a laboratory to test all this technology for future interested clients.
Comparing both realities - China and Usa monitoring
This level of surveillance as a whole can’t be compared to any democratic country but still some features are used in Western World to monitor and even oppress communities, specially if they are part of a minority.
According to the episode of crazy/genius, produced by Jesse Brenneman and Patricia Yacob, some residents of Atlantic Plaza Towers, a rent-stabilized apartment complex in East Brooklyn have reported an omnipresence of security cameras in and around their home. in fact the landlord mailed residents a letter announcing plans to install a facial-recognition-technology system at the entrance of the buildings. The letter asked tenants for their permission, but that request seemed less than genuine, for several reasons. Many tenants never received the letter—one of the mailrooms was under reconstruction, disrupting delivery services. Worse, after some residents met in the lobby to discuss the landlord’s plan, they received a threatening letter from management warning them not to gather in public spaces again.
According to Mona Patel of Brooklyn Legal Services, the landlord may have another motive that’s just as sinister as displacement: data harvesting, so they can use this data for their own benefit for the sake of “Security”.
The decay Liberalism
With the SCS, China is boldly presenting its ambition to prove the viability of big data surveillance as a substitute for independent and accountable institutions, such as banks, courts, and transparent bureaucracies, that have traditionally been considered to be prerequisites for long-term development.
Despite its vibrant market economy, China suffers from a lack of trust among market participants that often results in rule-breaking and increased transaction costs, which you can call corruption. for instance, the Chinese State needs to be able to control the Banking System to support State-Owned Enterprises, many of which enjoy preferential access to loans despite their lack of competitiveness.
Personally I think, there are probably many benefits of that if we scape the fact that attempts against privacy rights but economically, I only see benefits for the State Management. You can easier hold Chinese Communist Party members accountable for bureaucratic dysfunction ranging from loss and theft of important documents to falsification of official statistics
Also in China, since this is a huge country, the Communist Party set the guidelines of the national policy or the goals to be fulfilled and the regional bureaucracy implements all these policies at a regional level making it difficult for the central government to supervise all these implementations apart from the possible corruption these other “regional” bureaucrats may be part of too. if they make everything public then the level of transparency will help minimizing the corruption without question.
It can be also important to notice that many Chinese are very hard workers and entrepreneurs. The social status and money is a very important matter for them. They are not naive about the fact that this model, if it works, can be exportable to other countries, and all the good money and business opportunities coming from that. This can be also a difference with the Western World, the level of competitiveness of Chinese in terms of dedication has not counter part on Western World. In fact some of its cyber governance architecture capabilities have already been exported to some countries like South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, countries where China has a big influence for different reasons, Pakistan with whom a very close commercial relations has been set in place because of the strategic importance of Pakistan in Silk Road Project,… They use different methods to get it done like for example at international industry meetings, government officials attempt to exchange business deals for support of their proposals on technical standards (Beattle 2019). Chinese authorities have stepped up pressure on major internet companies, including those banned in china like Google and Facebook, to cooperate with its censorship policies (Mozur 2018).
To synthesise, Chinese ambition is to control and overpass the USA as the dominant country in the world and they probably understand that the way to do it is being the dominant country in all sorts of technology and specially data technology.
We can observe how Chinese government has the capacity to enable this SCS which is almost impossible now in the Western countries. So the question is if western countries, in special USA will react and implement something similar if the system works and how this policy will shape the World as we know it today.
However from a philosophical point of view, we rescue a thought from the book Seeing Like a State written by James C. Scott, ‘Although science and technology have been the drivers of modernisation, the valorisation of the scientific organisation and standardisation of human and natural life, coupled with weak civil society and authoritarianism, often unleashed a destructive force that resulted in humanitarian and ecological crises’.
