In October 2018, Vice President Mike Pence paid a visit to the Hudson Institute—a conservative Washington, DC, think tank—to give a wide-ranging speech about the United States’ relationship with China. Standing stiffly in a shiny blue tie, he began by accusing the Chinese Communist Party of interfering in US politics and directing Chinese businesses to steal American intellectual property by “any means necessary.” Pence then turned his attention to the country’s human rights abuses, starting not with the persecution of religious minorities, but with a peculiar governmental initiative: the social credit project. “By 2020, China’s rulers aim to implement an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life—the so-called ‘social credit score,’” Pence said. “In the words of that program’s official blueprint, it will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.’”
The vice president’s remarks echoed a steady stream of Western media reports, published in dozens of outlets over the past few years, that paint China’s Social Credit System as a dystopian nightmare straight out of Black Mirror. The articles and broadcast segments often said China’s central government is using a futuristic algorithm to compile people’s social media connections, buying histories, location data, and more into a single score dictating their rights and freedoms. The government can supposedly analyze footage from hundreds of millions of facial-recognition-equipped surveillance cameras in real time, and then dock you points for misbehavior like jaywalking or playing too many video games.
This story was produced in collaboration with PRI's The World, the award-winning public radio show and podcast on global issues, news, and insights from BBC, WGBH, PRI, and PRX. It was coreported by The World's Lydia Emmanouilidou. You can listen to The World's audio program about China's social credit score here.
But there is no single, all-powerful score assigned to every individual in China, at least not yet. The “official blueprint” Pence referenced is a planning document released by China’s chief administrative body five years ago. It calls for the establishment of a nationwide scheme for tracking the trustworthiness of everyday citizens, corporations, and government officials. The Chinese government and state media say the project is designed to boost public confidence and fight problems like corruption and business fraud. Western critics often see social credit instead as an intrusive surveillance apparatus for punishing dissidents and infringing on people’s privacy.
With just over a year to go until the government’s self-imposed deadline for establishing the laws and regulations governing social credit, Chinese legal researchers say the system is far from the cutting-edge, Big Brother apparatus portrayed in the West’s popular imagination. “I really think you would find a much larger percentage of Americans are aware of Chinese social credit than you would find Chinese people are aware of Chinese social credit,” says Jeremy Daum, a senior research fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center in Beijing. The system as it exists today is more a patchwork of regional pilots and experimental projects, with few indications about what could be implemented at a national scale.
That’s not to say that fears about social credit are entirely unfounded. The Chinese government is already using new technologies to control its citizens in frightening ways. The internet is highly censored, and each person’s cell phone number and online activity is assigned a unique ID number tied to their real name. Facial-recognition technology is also increasingly widespread in China, with few restraints on how it can be used to track and surveil citizens. The most troubling abuses are being carried out in the western province of Xinjiang, where human rights groups and journalists say the Chinese government is detaining and surveilling millions of people from the minority Muslim Uyghur population on a nearly unprecedented scale.
But Western concerns about what could happen with China’s Social Credit System have in some ways outstripped discussions about what's already really occurring. Critiques are often based on worst-case scenarios far off in the future, and run the risk of minimizing the troubling aspects of the project as it is in place today. The exaggerated portrayals may also help to downplay surveillance efforts in other parts of the world. “Because China is often held up as the extreme of one end of a spectrum, I think that it moves the goalposts for the whole conversation,” says Daum. “So that anything less invasive than our imagined version of social credit seems sort of acceptable, because at least we’re not as bad as China.”
One of the earliest Western accounts was published by an unlikely source: the American Civil Liberties Union, which doesn’t operate in China. As part of his job as a policy analyst at the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Jay Stanley blogs about emerging threats to civil liberties. On October 5, 2015, he published a post titled “China’s Nightmarish Citizen Scores Are a Warning for Americans.” The article is representative of much of the initial wave of coverage, which was often derived from secondhand information that traveled like a game of telephone, rather than on-the-ground reporting. Stanley’s post was sourced largely from a similar story from Privacy News Online, which itself was based on an article from a Swedish website.
Today Stanley says he intended to highlight China’s program as a cautionary tale for the US. “This really seemed to be pointing the way towards a dark potential future,” he says. “There were frankly a lot of signs and similarities to things happening in the United States,” like digital profiling. The ACLU post wasn’t the only outlet to use China’s nascent system as a way to draw attention to privacy and surveillance issues in the West. “The more I look around, the more it seems like an American social credit system is springing up around us—and it doesn’t look all that different from China’s,” Casey Newton, a writer at The Verge, wrote in his popular newsletter just last month. "China's Dystopian Tech Could Be Contagious," The Atlantic similarly declared last year.
While a number of journalists and academics have tried to correct the record, the science fiction myths about China’s social credit score continue to endure in the West. “There’s so much that’s been written about this now that’s wrong, that it’s really taken on a life of its own,” says Shazeda Ahmed, a PhD student at the University of California at Berkeley studying the Social Credit System in China. “I still see articles quoting things from 2014, 2015, that I thought were largely debunked.”
The confusion is understandable, though. First, there’s the language barrier. Daum says the phrase “social credit,” has different connotations in English that it does in Chinese. To an English speaker, the two words together might signal a reference to interpersonal relationships. In Chinese, the term is more closely associated with a phrase like “public trust.” There’s also the added linguistic hurdle of deciphering dense legal documents. “I think language is a real barrier,” says Daum. “Both legal jargon and political jargon and Chinese versus English.”
The original plan for social credit released in 2014 is also vague and sweeping, and it wasn’t entirely clear what the project might ultimately consist of. “They expected the different parts of the government, both centrally and locally, to try out their own approach in terms of implementation,” says Xin Dai, a professor and associate dean at China’s Ocean University Law School, who has researched social credit. “You have this really massive but also chaotic scene of different people trying to put together different types of programs.”
