Back نظام الرصيد الاجتماعي Arabic Социална кредитна система Bulgarian Sistema de crèdit social Catalan Systém sociálního kreditu Czech Kinas sociale pointsystem Danish Sozialkredit-System German Σύστημα κοινωνικής πίστωσης Greek Sistema de crédito social chino Spanish Sosiaalinen luottoluokitusjärjestelmä Finnish Système de crédit social French

Social Credit System

Not to be confused with social credit, an interdisciplinary and distributive philosophy, or Zhima Credit, a private financial credit-scoring and loyalty program by Ant Group.

Social Credit System
Simplified Chinese社会信用体系
Traditional Chinese社會信用體系
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu Pinyinshèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì
Part of a series on
Nudge theory
Social scientists
Government programs
Government agencies
Nudge theory in business
Related concepts

The Social Credit System (Chinese: 社会信用体系; pinyin: shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì) is a national credit rating and blacklist being developed by the government of China.[1] The social credit initiative calls for the establishment of a record system so that businesses, individuals and government institutions can be tracked and evaluated for trustworthiness.[2][3] There are multiple forms of the social credit system being experimented with,[4][5] while the national regulatory method is based on whitelisting (termed redlisting in China) and blacklisting.[6][7][8] There is no universal social credit score or system.

The origin of the concept can be traced back to the 1980s when the Chinese government attempted to develop a personal banking and financial credit rating system, especially for rural individuals and small businesses who lacked documented records.[9] The program first emerged in the early 2000s, inspired by the credit scoring systems in other countries.[1] The program initiated regional trials in 2009, before launching a national pilot with eight credit scoring firms in 2014.[10][7]

The Social Credit System is an extension to the existing legal and financial credit rating system in China.[11] Managed by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the People's Bank of China (PBOC) and the Supreme People's Court (SPC),[12] the system was intended to standardize the credit rating function and perform financial and social assessment for businesses, government institutions, individuals and non-government organizations.[13][14][15] The Chinese government's stated aim is to enhance trust in society with the system and regulate businesses in areas such as food safety, intellectual property, and financial fraud.[11][9][16]

There is a common misconception that China operates a nationwide "social credit score" system that assigns individuals a score based on their behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low. However, this is not true. Western media reports have sometimes exaggerated or inaccurately described this concept.[17][18] According to the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a Berlin-based think tank, the social credit system does not continuously monitor or evaluate individual behavior. Punishments are only for violations of laws and regulations. A quantifying score does not exist.[19]

  1. ^ a b "China's social credit score – untangling myth from reality | Merics". merics.org. 11 February 2022. Retrieved 10 August 2022.
  2. ^ Stevenson, Alexandra; Mozur, Paul (22 September 2019). "China Scores Businesses, and Low Grades Could Be a Trade-War Weapon". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
  3. ^ Cheng, Evelyn (4 September 2019). "China is building a 'comprehensive system' for tracking companies' activities, report says". CNBC. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
  4. ^ Ahmed, Shazeda (1 May 2019). "The Messy Truth About Social Credit". logic magazine.
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference Liu-2019 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Yang, Zeyi (22 November 2022). "China just announced a new social credit law. Here's what it means". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
  7. ^ a b Hornby, Lucy. "China changes tack on 'social credit' scheme plan". Financial Times. 5 July 2017. Retrieved 14 July 2017.
  8. ^ Matsakis, Louise (29 July 2019). "How the West Got China's Social Credit System Wrong". Wired. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
  9. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference merics was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ Zhong, Yuhao (Summer 2019). "Rethinking the Social Credit System: A Long Road to Establishing Trust in Chinese Society" (PDF). Symposium on Applications of Contextual Integrity: 28–29 – via Privaci.info.
  11. ^ a b "China's Social Credit System: Speculation vs. Reality". The Diplomat. Archived from the original on 30 March 2021.
  12. ^ "What is China's social credit system and why is it controversial?". South China Morning Post. 9 August 2020. Retrieved 8 December 2020.
  13. ^ 国务院关于印发社会信用体系建设规划纲要（2014—2020年）的通知. Central Government of China (in Chinese (China)). Retrieved 10 November 2019.
  14. ^ Meissner, Mirjam (24 May 2017). "China's Social Credit System: A big-data enabled approach to market regulation with broad implications for doing business in China" (PDF). www.merics.org. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 March 2018. Retrieved 11 July 2017.
  15. ^ Cite error: The named reference merics_2103 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  16. ^ Botsman, Rachel (2017). Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart. London, UK: Portfolio Penguin.
  17. ^ Cite error: The named reference meme was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  18. ^ Cite error: The named reference Yu-2023 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  19. ^ "China's social credit score – untangling myth from reality | Merics". merics.org. 11 February 2022. Retrieved 6 July 2024. The biggest disconnect is around the notion of scores. Some commentators seem to imagine that a magic algorithm draws from AI cameras and internet surveillance all over the country to calculate a score that determines everyone's place in society. In reality, the SoCS is not the techno-dystopian nightmare we fear: it is lowly digitalized, highly fragmented, and primarily focuses on businesses. Most importantly, such a score simply does not exist.

Developed by StudentB