Hoffman disagrees with that argument, arguing that such a system involves government power. “If the real goal was to solve problems, the Chinese Communist Party wouldn’t need public trust to do it,” she says. “China’s social credit system is a state-directed program designed to achieve one goal: to maintain and expand the power of the Chinese Communist Party.”
She describes social credit as a technology-enabled method of linking political power to social and economic development that has been debated in this country since the 1980s, and that it is based on Mao Zedong’s mass line (how party leadership governs society). He added that it is automation (a term used to describe how things have been created and managed). . “In Mao’s China, the mass line relied on ideological mass mobilization that leveraged Mao’s personal charisma to force participation,” Hoffman says. “Since the Mao Zedong era, the Chinese Communist Party has been unable to rely on ideological mobilization as its primary means of operating social control.”
Is there anything more than social trust?
China’s social credit system is developing, but it is only one part of the country’s surveillance state. Not only is web content available through the country’s firewall strictly controlled, but social media is also monitored and censored.
Ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, researchers at the University of Hong Kong discovered that important posts on social networks Weibo and Wechat were deleted. All major video platforms also turned off comments about the need for system upgrades. There’s also been a crackdown on the use of VPNs to help protect your privacy online.
The country has developed an advanced facial recognition system that can track people across cities. As part of a show of power in late 2017, Chinese officials collaborated with China. bbc news We showed you how to track down and find one of the organization’s reporters in under 7 minutes. Journalist John Sudworth’s movements were being monitored to track him using a network of 170 million surveillance cameras across the country.
Even more worrying, the country’s northwestern Xinjiang region has become a testing ground for China’s vast digital control operations. In particular, the Muslim-majority Uyghur minority faces increased surveillance and discrimination. It has been revealed that more than 500,000 Uighur facial scans have been carried out.
What does this mean for China?
Since this system is not yet fully in place, it is impossible to say the full extent of its impact on social credit for the Chinese people. Zeng suggests that the reality lies somewhere between government claims and Western media’s depictions of a frightening dystopia. “This is really like baby steps,” she said of her efforts so far.
Ohlberg agrees that early reports had multiple errors that misled the system, but that doesn’t mean Social Credit isn’t dangerous. “It’s somewhere between people who say the media coverage is inaccurate and that means it’s not that bad, and people who see this huge dystopia,” she said. says. “We have to find this space where we can describe it as actually being very scary, even if it’s not the way it’s portrayed.”
That’s why other countries shouldn’t consider the idea, Hoffman said. “Western countries should not copy any aspect of social credit,” Hoffman said. “Often people compare private applications like Uber with their customer and driver rating systems. In my view, these private companies’ systems are very problematic, but fundamentally different. is an authoritarian state and the Chinese Communist Party is “responsible for decades of gross human rights abuses. Now look at the example of Xinjiang. It is difficult for liberal democracies to imitate the social credit system. You shouldn’t even think about that.”
Updated 24.01.19, 11:20 GMT: Alibaba does not own Ant Financial’s Sesame Credit system.
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