The whole neighbourhood is divided up into ‘cells’, with 400 families to each unit. ‘These families keep an eye on each other,’ says Dong Jiangang. ‘We’ve got people who inspect their block. They sometimes question other residents, and they take pictures and record videos of bad behaviour.’
The Party began to roll out this technology-assisted ‘grid management system’ of monitoring in 2001, in cities like Shanghai. There is a long tradition of these systems in China. In the fourth century BC the statesman Shang Yang, who laid the foundations for China’s unification and thus paved the way for the rule of its first emperor, divided the population into groups of five to ten families. People were required to monitor and denounce each other. If one person made a mistake, everyone in the group was punished. One document states: ‘If the punishments are severe and collective, then no one will even dare attempt (to commit a crime). And if no one even tries, there is no need for punishment.’ Already at that time, autocrats were dreaming of the new man who has internalised control, the subject who monitors himself.
The Communist Party’s moral and social credit system also has historical precursors. The 16th and 17th centuries saw a great demand for ‘ledgers of merit and demerit’ among the population of China. They were influenced by Confucian and Buddhist moral ideas and ways of life; anyone who was in doubt about how karma would reward their deeds, both good and bad, could simply look it up in these ledgers. It was a time of political and economic upheaval, social and moral confusion. Commercialisation and the growth of the market brought the old hierarchies into question, and in some cases turned them on their heads. In a society presided over by Confucian scholars, the merchant class had always been the scum of the earth, but all of a sudden the merchants started climbing the social scale, gaining prestige and influence.
The ledgers gave confused and helpless citizens something to cling to in an age of state corruption, changing values and rapid mobility. In Yuan Huang’s ledger, for example, anyone who saved another person’s life or a woman’s chastity was awarded 100 points. Ensuring the continuance of the family line or adopting an orphan was worth 50 points, and recommending a virtuous person for office was worth 10. This is not so different from the ledger of the First Morning Light neighbourhood. It’s just that today the CCP and big data have replaced karma, and reward and punishment will come your way in this lifetime – ideally here and now.
In the city of Rongcheng, the municipal handbook says that the system aims to provide ‘incentives’ and that punishments are only meant to ‘help’. Dong Jiangang, the Party Secretary for First Morning Light, is thinking about the bigger picture, far beyond his neighbourhood. ‘We are ensuring that society is harmonious.’ Dong tells me about the parents who come to him before their daughter’s wedding, eager to find out about their potential son-in-law’s score – the system already serves as a son-in-law trustworthiness meter of sorts. On his rose-patterned sofa, old Qin lets out a laugh. ‘Of course you’d want to know what you’re letting yourself in for!’ says Dong Jiangang. ‘Admit it: you would do exactly the same thing’.
Being a model citizen also makes financial sense. ‘If a person has a lot of points, like our fine Mr Qin here, then they no longer need to provide guarantees when they want a bank loan,’ Dong says. ‘Isn’t that great? But that’s how our Party works: if you’re good, it will be good to you.’ What if I’m bad? ‘Then eventually you won’t be allowed to board planes or high-speed trains. And I won’t hire you.’
It’s true. This is exactly what it says in the document entitled ‘Warning and Punishment Mechanisms for Trust-Breakers’, published by the CCP’s Central Committee and the Chinese State Council in October 2016. Companies that engage in fraudulent activities risk being excluded from public tenders. Citizens who have lost trust points aren’t allowed to apply for government jobs. Their access to insurance and bank loans is either limited or removed altogether. Buying a car or building a house becomes difficult. People with low scores can no longer fly, buy tickets for high-speed trains, or travel in the comfortable cabins on sleeper trains. Their internet access is restricted to low-speed networks. Trust-breakers don’t get to stay at luxury hotels or eat in exclusive restaurants. They can even be prevented from travelling outside China, and their children are denied access to the country’s expensive schools.
Many details of the system are still unclear. Which of the three dozen-plus regional models will win through? Can they continue to exist in parallel, or will unified national standards be set out? Will the country end up with a kind of social-credit ecosystem, housing a huge range of incentive and punishment models, or one seamless machine? When and how will the credit system be integrated into the private-sector economy? At the national level alone, no fewer than 46 Party organisations and government bodies are working out the details. The government is in the process of introducing a single, country-wide credit number system: in future, each citizen and each company will be allocated a number, under which all relevant information will be saved.
A few pieces of the puzzle are already in place: for decades, China has operated incentive systems that reward morally upright, conformist behaviour, turning grafters into ‘heroes of work’ or families into ‘role models of hygiene’. In 2013, a law was enacted requiring all Chinese people to care for their aging parents under threat of punishment. The same year, China’s Supreme Court began keeping a list of defaulting debtors, which became the basis for the Social Credit System’s nationwide blacklist. The National Public Information Centre has now announced that in 2018, seventeen and a half million Chinese citizens were denied access to planes, while five and half million were not allowed to buy tickets for the high-speed trains. In two districts of Henan Province, the courts are working with local telecoms companies: if you make a call to someone on the blacklist, then instead of the ringing tone, you’ll hear a message informing you that the person you’re trying to reach has been placed ‘on the list of trust-breakers’.
Public exposure is built into the system. The internet portal Credit China, which the government has set up for the credit system, has posted a series of cartoons by way of illustration.128 If the courts have put someone on their blacklist, the website says, ‘then his photo will appear on large screens all over the city, so that he will no longer be able to hide and passers-by everywhere will be able to see his photo and his personal information.’
One of the cartoons shows a young man in a suit and bowtie brandishing a bunch of roses for the woman he adores. He is breaking into a sweat because he has evidently just been identified as a defaulting debtor. ‘Disgrace’ says a box above his head, with an arrow pointing to him. And the pretty girl declines his advances: ‘You never pay back your debts,’ she says. ‘I’ve seen your photo on the street committee’s big video screen. No one will want to go on a date with you now.’ The caption warns: ‘Don’t ruin your whole life with your breaches of trust’.
The music video app Douyin (TikTok, in English) has begun to involve the public in the hunt for trust-breakers – another example of the close cooperation between private internet companies and the state. Users in Guangxi Province were shown images of wanted people who had been placed on blacklists between their music videos. Anyone who knew where to find one of these people, the app said, should tip off the police. As a reward, they would receive a share of the value of that person’s debts.
Credit China allows you to search for specific people whose names appear on blacklists. The virtuous are placed on ‘redlists’. A second website provides similar information about companies that have been sanctioned: there were 3.59 million of them in 2018, among them, to take just one example, scandal-hit vaccine manufacturers. The mechanisms for punishment, according to an official notification from March 2018, work on the principle that ‘breaches of trust in one place bring sanctions everywhere’. So a flying ban might be imposed for air rage, but also for tax evasion, financial misconduct or underpaying social security contributions. In future,
month-long train-travel bans will be issued not only to people caught illegally re-selling tickets, but to anyone who lights a cigarette on a high-speed train.
The dang’an, the secret file that documents the lives of every single individual, is a relic from the days of Mao. It includes information on people’s preferences and aversions, their career path, and their political reliability. In the past, this information was only kept in paper files, which in recent years had almost been forgotten. But now, all the individual pieces of data are being pooled into a new whole. The official guide to the system contains a section entitled ‘Acceleration of the Punishment Software’, in which its aim is described as ‘automatic verification, automatic monitoring, and automatic punishment’ of each breach of trust. No more loopholes, anywhere.
Although the government has been working flat out on the system since at least 2014, most Chinese have never heard of it. ‘Well,’ a friend in Beijing shrugs, ‘in this country, we’re all naked anyway.’ When it comes to access by the Party and the state, hardly anyone expects real privacy in China, and most people are fatalistic about it. After all, you can’t be more naked than naked. Unless, say, someone opens up your skull and peers into your thoughts.
The existence of the system is only gradually seeping into public consciousness. The closer we come to the year 2020, the more blacklists of trust-breakers appear and the more actual cases of reward and punishment are published in the Party media. ‘The trustworthiness society is nearly here: are you ready?’ asked the People’s Daily in summer 2018. When I have told Chinese people a little about the system, a lot have reacted positively, saying that it would be great to finally have more trust within society. But when in spring 2018, a state middle school in Shandong Province announced that from now on it would not be accepting applications from children whose parents were on blacklists, there was a storm of online outrage at this visiting of the sins of the parents upon their innocent offspring.
The best-known example of a social-credit pilot project in China is not state-administered, but run by a private company. Sesame Credit is part of the Alipay app, the market leader in cashless payments with around 600 million customers. All Alipay customers are able to activate Sesame Credit, and are then rated on a scale between 350 and 950 points. The algorithm that evaluates the data is secret. But the programme’s creators have clearly specified five areas on which your rating is based: in addition to your identity, your ability to pay back debts and your financial history, behavioural preferences and personal networks also count.
Li Yingyun, the project’s technical director, has said that, for example: ‘Someone who plays video games for 10 hours a day would be considered idle, and someone who frequently buys nappies would probably be recognised as a parent, who is more likely to have a sense of responsibility.’ According to the Shanghai website The Paper, people can lose points for changing addresses too often. ‘What’s more,’ The Paper writes, ‘your friends’ scores will affect your Sesame rating’. The message is clear: stay away from friends with low scores.
Sesame Credit cooperates with Baihe, China’s largest dating platform: singles looking for a partner can advertise their Sesame scores there. Point champions will also have easier access to loans, and they already enjoy an express visa service to countries such as Luxembourg and Singapore. Alipay is increasingly looking to expand into the West. Chinese travellers can already use Alipay in many places in the United States or Europe. The trade-off is that the app then transmits their transaction and GPS data back to China in real time.
Even so, the future of the commercial credit systems is uncertain. The Chinese People’s Bank granted eight private companies permission to run pilot projects, but recently decided not to issue any with a permanent licence, citing data protection reasons, as well as the fact that ‘conflicts of interest’ could not be overlooked.
Many have argued that Alibaba is using the incentive system of its Sesame Credit subsidiary mainly to boost its own revenue rather than the social behaviour of its users. Reports have also started to emerge about how the system can be gamed: in one article on Weibo, hackers boast of people paying them to tweak their data on Alipay so that it generates more points. A report by MERICS predicts that: ‘As the Social Credit System unfolds, it is likely that additional methods of data forgery will arise.’129
The system’s creators emphasize the benefits of ‘social trustworthiness’. They say it helps rein in the worst excesses of the fraud that allegedly costs China 90 billion dollars a year. Electronic payment systems will also, they predict, give millions of underprivileged Chinese citizens access to credit. In the past, groups such as farmers, labourers and students were unable to prove their creditworthiness. Ultimately, of course, the project is designed to trigger consumption and deliver a massive economic stimulus.
Some people are not so sanguine. The writer Murong Xuecun finds the system ‘creepy’: ‘They talk about trust. In reality, it’s about control, down to the very last personal detail. What will happen if you write something stupid on the internet as a young man? Okay, they may not arrest you, but they might confiscate your passport or your driver’s license. Or freeze your bank account.’
Since Murong Xuecun’s Weibo accounts were shut down and he was banned from publishing novels and screenplays, he has been scraping a living selling cosmetics, strawberries, and honeydew melons (among other things) on the internet. ‘Once the system is really up and running, China will surpass anything George Orwell dreamed up,’ he says. ‘As a politically unreliable oddball, I will probably get a very bad rating. It might stop me from travelling abroad or taking the train. Maybe my landlord will throw me out. Well, I guess then I’ll have to sleep under a bridge.’ The author was more than an hour late to our interview. The secret police had read about his appointment with me on WeChat, and tried to persuade him to cancel until the very last minute.
Some take comfort in the idea that the new surveillance system may never work as it is meant to. After all, it comes with huge technical challenges: pooling all the data, ensuring its accuracy, evaluating it effectively… The Communist Party has a long history of failed attempts to ‘civilise’ the Chinese population. Despite countless campaigns, people in Beijing continue to spit on the street, and some residents of Shanghai still walk to the greengrocer’s in their pyjamas in broad daylight.
But would it really be better if the system turns out to be rife with the inefficiency, manipulability and corruption that currently characterise the Chinese state – and yet still had the power to reward and punish citizens? The system’s creators have two central aims: trustworthiness and political control. And while it is entirely possible that the first will fail, the latter is likely to work perfectly.
In the end, the Party still decides who is trustworthy and who isn’t, and why. A person in Rongcheng who engages online in ‘illegal religious activities’ (in this part of China the phrase mainly applies to the harshly persecuted Falun Gong movement) loses a whopping 100 points. It’s the maximum deduction. Petitioners who try to draw attention to injustices they have suffered at the hands of local authorities during important Party or government conferences are docked 50 points. Anyone who takes their petition all the way to Beijing is automatically reclassified as a Category D: dishonest trust-breaker.
In Rongcheng, you can also be punished for ‘negative online behaviour’: say, for posting a comment on Weibo that could have ‘a damaging influence on society’. Who decides what is damaging or negative? ‘Don’t worry’, says Huang Chunhui, the director of the Office of Creditworthiness. ‘We only act on things that are uncontested and have been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt.’ Through court rulings? ‘Not just that,’ Huang says. ‘We also rely on the assessment of the security services.’ In the end, it’s the police and state security who make the call.
The system doesn’t just capture the ‘social trustworthiness’ of individuals, but also of companies and organisations – in fact, of every organisation op
erating in China, meaning that foreigners are also affected. Here, too, the political direction of travel is becoming ever clearer. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in China had been struggling for air after a law passed in early 2017 to bring them under control.130 Then, in 2018, some were issued with a 40-page handbook, the main message of which was that they – and their leaders – must submit to the social credit system with immediate effect. In future, they would win and lose points for every move they made.
‘Endangering China’s reunification and national unity’? A fat 100-point deduction for the foundation, and 50 for its CEO. ‘Libel’ or ‘publishing damaging information’? Also 100 points docked. Is any criticism of Xi Jinping and the Party now taboo? How about expressions of sympathy for democracy in Taiwan? And would, for example, the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Beijing face penalties if one of its representatives were to appear at a Tibet or Taiwan event in Berlin? Is the CCP hoping to use the system to export its values and political ideas? The handbook suggests as much.
Of course, your organisation can also gain points: for instance, by promoting ‘international friendship’ (5 to 10 points) or by forming ‘grass-roots cells of the Communist Party of China’. A CCP cell within the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which is affiliated to the right-of-centre Christian Democratic Union party in Germany? It doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon.
Zhang Zheng, the economist and professor at Peking University, raves about the advantages of the system. It’s an opportunity, he says, to deal with badly-run companies, doctors who take bribes, violent teachers and corrupt civil servants. However, he is also one of the few who also warn of the dangers, which include a disproportionate concentration of data and abuse of state power. This is precisely why he is against the creation of a central database, into which all other databases in the country would feed information. This all-knowing database, if ever created, would be the new brain of Chinese society.
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