Hello!
This week we’ve got our first guest on to explain the ‘social credit system’ in China. Our guest is Xin Dai, and he is a law professor at Peking University who studied law at the University of Chicago.
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Something I initially noticed was how quick US (and other Anglosphere) media was to label China’s system as ‘Orwellian’ or like ‘Big Brother’ or ‘Black Mirror.’
Fortunately, there have been plenty of articles to clear up some misunderstandings and misconceptions of China’s system. (See here or here or here.)
One of the first things I sought to do was to break down the language barriers that have led to an English translation that sounds far more sinister than what it would be in the Chinese language. In Chinese, it is 社会信用体系 (shehui xinyong tixi), 社会 (shehui) being the word we use for society or societal, and 信用 (xinyong) as trustworthiness or creditworthiness (literally the use or employment of trust, confidence, faith).
Of course, it’s easy to see how the Chinese phrase could be obscured in English, where ‘social credit’ evokes something more like a credit score that determines your social ranking, since we equate credit to a numerical score, rather than to the more general idea of creditworthiness. We tend to use ‘social’ in English more in terms of how we relate to others, rather than the functioning and well-being of society.
With that in mind, it’s much easier to envision China’s system as a way for the government to crack down on fraud and abuse to foster more trustworthiness and cohesion among citizens.
One of the greatest misconceptions is that the system is pervasive and has been in existence for a long time, but in reality, it has mostly existed as a patchwork of local pilot projects with the aim to become central legislation by the year 2020, but the goal has obviously been missed due to COVID-19. It’s uncertain, as of now, what the future of the system in China will look like.
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With that context out of the way, we go deeper in this episode to understand what actually is the system in China, and what Western media often gets wrong about it. Additionally, are there similar types of systems all around us that we don’t even notice?
Link to Xin Dai's paper about reputation systems and China's system from 2018: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3193577
One of many: China's 'social credit system'