China’s
new ‘social credit system’ turns Orwell’s ‘1984’ into reality
Imagine calling a friend. Only
instead of hearing a ring tone you hear a police siren, and then a voice
intoning, “Be careful in your dealings with this person.”
Would
that put a damper on your relationship? It’s supposed to.
Welcome
to life in China’s “Social Credit System,” where a low score can ruin your life
in more ways than one.
Say you
arrive at the Beijing airport, intending to catch a flight to Canton 1,200
miles south. The clerk at the ticket counter turns you away because — you
guessed it — your social credit score is too low.
Not
only are you publicly humiliated in the ticket line, you are then forced to
travel by slow train. What should have been a three-hour flight becomes a
30-hour, stop-and-go nightmare.
All
because the government has declared you untrustworthy. Perhaps you defaulted on
a loan, made the mistake of criticizing some government policy online or just
spent too much time playing video games on the internet. All of these actions,
and many more, can cause your score to plummet, forcing citizens onto the most
dreaded rung on China’s deadbeat caste system, the laolai.
And the
punishments are shocking. The government algorithm will go as far as to install
an “embarrassing” ring tone on the phones of laolai, shaming them every time
they get a call in public.
But an
embarrassing ring tone, flight bans and slow trains are just the beginning of
the dystopian nightmare that is now daily life in China for tens of millions of
people.
A low
social credit score will exclude you from well-paid jobs, make it impossible
for you to get a house or a car loan or even book a hotel room. The government
will slow down your internet connection, ban your children from attending
private schools and even post your profile on a public blacklist for all to
see.
According
to Australia’s ABC News,
the government has produced a “Deadbeat Map” via an app on WeChat, which shows
a radar-style graphic identifying every laolai in the vicinity of the user.
“Tapping
on a person marked on the map reveals their personal information, including
their full name, court-case number and the reason they have been labeled
untrustworthy. Identity-card numbers and home addresses are also partially
shown,” ABC reported.
There
are reports that those whose social credit score falls too low are preemptively
arrested and sent to re-education camps. Not because they have actually
committed a crime, but because they are likely to.
Elements
of the system are in place throughout China, as the government refines its
algorithm, and the final rollout is scheduled to be in place nationwide by
2020.
The
government claims that its purpose is to enhance trust and social stability by
creating a “culture of sincerity” that will “restore social trust.”
What it
will actually create, of course, is a culture of fear and a nation of
informants.
This is
because one of the ways that people can improve their own social credit score
is to report on the supposed misdeeds of others.
Individuals
can earn points, for example, for reporting those who violate the new
restrictions on religious practice, such as Christians who illegally meet to
pray in private homes, or the Muslim Uyghurs and Kazakhs in China’s far west
whom they spot praying in public, fasting during Ramadan or just growing a
beard.
Of
course, as the state progresses ever closer toward its goal of monitoring all
of the activities of its citizens 24 hours a day, seven days a week, society
itself becomes a virtual prison.
Western
criticism of the new system has been intense, with Human Rights Watch describing it as
“chilling.”
In
response, Chinese Communist Party publications scoff that Westerners are simply
too unsophisticated to understand the wonders of the new system.
In the words of China’s Global Times, “The hypothetical
theories of the West are based on their ignorance.” The massive social credit
system, it goes on to say, is simply “beyond the understanding of Western
countries.”
But I
think we understand what is going on all too well.
It is
China’s ancient totalitarian impulse — the absolute rule of the god-emperor
over his subjects — brought into the modern age. It is George Orwell’s
prophetic “1984” come
alive.
China’s
already formidable police state has been upgraded using big data, machine
learning, face recognition technology and artificial intelligence into a
fearsome cyborg of state control. The Chinese Communist Party has given birth
to the world’s first high-tech digital dictatorship.
Not
content to incarcerate its own population in a virtual prison, China is busily
hawking its creation to like-minded socialist dictatorships. Maduro’s Venezuela
was China’s first customer.
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