China will launch a controversial lifelong points program by 2021, across multiple cities including Beijing, to monitor its 22 billion citizens, using personalized ratings that will be assigned to each resident, based on their social behaviours. This “personal integrity” project has been piloted, starting late 2017, in Hangzhou, a city in Eastern China with a population of 9.5 million. The monitoring program will be fully operational by 2020. When the pilot was launched, the Chinese government said the intention was to “guide the citizens to be honest and promote the socialist core values.”
The system is relatively straight forward. Those people who follow the rules set by the Chinese Communist Party and exhibit pro-social behaviours (volunteer work, blood donation etc.), attitudes and reputations will earn good social credit and be rewarded with “green channel” benefits (easier access to gyms, jobs and university applications, VIP treatment at hotels, cheaper loans). Those in violation of the laws would pay a “heavy price” and be “locked out” of society, in the form of blockage from booking train and plane tickets, denial of access to government jobs or credit etc.
This monitoring program will be enforced via the high-tech surveillance systems in China. These will pool information for myriad government agencies and transit authorities, using tracking technologies that would link databases to create a detailed picture of citizens and interactions across different services and networks of social apps and mobile phones.
As rules that obligate internet providers and social networks to remove anonymity of users get enforced, policing bodies will be able to improve their blacklist systems. Tracking of individual behaviour has already become simpler with the virtual and centralised nature of economic activities i.e. making payments, organising transport etc. Online accounts are generally linked to mobile phone numbers, which require government IDS.
The government’s 200 million cameras that monitor activity in open public spaces will enable the use of facial recognition technology, body scanning and geo-tracking. Moreover, big data from traditional sources of information like state security, financial, government, educational and medical records/assessments will be fed into individual scores.
Trial social credit systems are now in multiple stages of development in a dozen cities across China. The final version of the national social credit system is uncertain. Several companies are collaborating with the state to nationalize them by configuring the technology and finalizing requisite algorithms, to determine the individual national citizen scores.
According to the official Party outline, this project will “allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” The Chinese state is not new to systems that have experimented with grading its citizens, rewarding acceptable behaviour with streamlined services and punishing unacceptable action with penalties and restrictions.Within China, there is a lack of public debate about the implementation of this system. A lot of people do not grasp fully, the consequences of such all-encompassing control. In private, some people have challenged this social credit model as reducing citizens merely to character assessment scores.
The Chinese do not accord the same premium to privacy as the West does.Chinese citizens are accustomed to the state interference in their personal affairs since China is primarily a surveillance state. In fact, due to the higher value given to community good over individual rights, social credit is defended for being a step towards creating a more secure, stable and safer society, especially for the children of parents with stellar scores.
This is probably the largest social engineering project that has ever been attempted, in order to control and coerce over a billion people. If China succeeds, it will essentially spearhead a form of digital dictatorship in the country, via this system of privileges and punishment.This digital dictatorship exemplifies a deepening of the Foucauldian conception of mass surveillance (panopticism) in the digital era and historian Yuval Noah Harari’s gloomy projection of a third grand revolution, based on control of data by governments, corporations or both.
India Outbound
February 13, 2019
source https://indiaoutbound.org/spearheading-digital-dictatorship-in-china/
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