Comment on 🇮🇱 Why Israel is Quietly Preventing Social Credit Scores in the US 🇺🇸 by mr.t

Parent Post: 🇮🇱 Why Israel is Quietly Preventing Social Credit Scores in the US 🇺🇸 · In Reply To

mr.t · 3/30/2025, 1:36:45 PM · permalink

Sure, I can expand a little.  
I think a rigorous explanation would be quite long (and require a bit of legwork and research), but I can give a couple points.  
There is partially what is basically a translation error at play, partially a misunderstanding of the original Orwellian experiment, and partially a misunderstanding of China more broadly.  
  
I believe that which people in the West perceive to be "China’s authoritarian model — where citizens are monitored, scored, and restricted based on their behavior", in other words the Black Mirror meme that has been widely reported on by the Western press this past decade, to be just that, a meme, rather than an actual model or set of policies.  
  
The first thing to understand is that the Chinese system is experimental by nature.  
The Chinese Central government incentivizes bureaucrats at the local level to experiment with new policies to out-compete their neighbors along various metrics that the CPC deems important.  
  
In the mid-2010s, the Social Credit Score was one of these experiments. The roll-out was limited to a handful of localities, and we're vaguely familiar with the policies from the famous case(s), forming the meme. These are the stories from cities like Rongcheng, a city of under a million people (the context being that China has over 100 cities with over a million people), and Suining, in the Shanghai area with a population of around a million.  
  
In the dystopian, Orwellian, experiment conducted in Rongcheng, the bad behaviors they were attacking were along the lines "drunk-driving", rewarding behaviors like helping relatives, and the policy seems to not have been resisted and was even appreciated to some degree.  
However in Suining, the local authorities went even further and monitored things like online activity. This policy was very unpopular and after public backlash, it was eventually canceled. It should be noted that Shanghai is one of the most Americanized/Westernized of all of the Chinese cities.  
It should also be noted that in Chinese discourse, there is concern about declining trust in society, and policies such as Social Credit Systems are discussed as a remediation against scams and other bad behaviors.  
  
The rhetoric surrounding these experiments suggested that they were rolled-out in preparation for a national policy, and the CPC has indeed been implementing national policies relating to Social Credit Systems.  
However, so far, these mostly resemble financial Credit Scores for the citizenry and perhaps something analogous to ESG scores for companies, except measuring compliance to various CPC directives and dictates (we should note that China does not really have a fleshed out legal system and is still transitioning from a poor marxist agrarian society into a rich/middle-class industrial society).  
  
The Chinese word for the policy is supposedly 征信 (zhengxin), which roughly translates into sincere heartfelt/seeking reliability. Most of these policies are associated with the term, from banal financial credit scores, to Orwellian online compliance regimes.  
However it should be noted that unlike the UK, there isn't a system for punishing people for what they say online.  
Though even without a formal system in place, the CPC will absolutely crush you if you have a significant voice and you challenge their power. They do have a big hammer in their toolkit, and they will absolutely strike the nails that stick out in a bad way, but the point is that you normally need to really stick out in order to get smacked, on the level of Jack Ma or Jimmy Lai.  
  
Broadly speaking, my reading of China is that the CPC promotes and practices real nationalism (that is the basis for their wealth and power after all) and advocates for the interests of their people, and thus promotes that which nurtures humanity (and thus builds wealth), except for that which challenges their hold on power (like political freedoms and processes), which they guard jealously.  
The WEF is in the opposite position. They jealousy seek power, wanting to convert their copious wealth into never-ending power and tyranny. Thus the WEF is opportunistically looking for ways to greatly expand their control, via a wide range of incredibly dystopian and anti-human practices. But the CPC already has absolute power, so they aren't as interested in those things.  
  
Basically, the CPC and Putin are doing the same thing, which perhaps aspires to that of the Philosopher King.  
The CPC is a fellow traveler to the extent that the WEF's enshittification/rape of Western societies creates an opportunity for China to increase its national power, wealth, and economic prowess.

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carp30mnia · 3/31/2025, 9:58:37 PM · permalink

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