Imagine calling a friend. Only instead of hearing a ring tone you hear a police siren, and then a voice intoning, “Be careful in your dealings with this person.”
Would that put a damper on your relationship? It’s supposed to.
Welcome to life in China’s “Social Credit System,” where a low score can ruin your life in more ways than one.
Say you arrive at the Beijing airport, intending to catch a flight to Canton 1,200 miles south. The clerk at the ticket counter turns you away because — you guessed it — your social credit score is too low.
Not only are you publicly humiliated in the ticket line, you are then forced to travel by slow train. What should have been a three-hour flight becomes a 30-hour, stop-and-go nightmare.
All because the government has declared you untrustworthy. Perhaps you defaulted on a loan, made the mistake of criticizing some government policy online or just spent too much time playing video games on the internet. All of these actions, and many more, can cause your score to plummet, forcing citizens onto the most dreaded rung on China’s deadbeat caste system, the laolai.
And the punishments are shocking. The government algorithm will go as far as to install an “embarrassing” ring tone on the phones of laolai, shaming them every time they get a call in public.
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There are reports that those whose social credit score falls too low are preemptively arrested and sent to re-education camps. Not because they have actually committed a crime, but because they are likely to.
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The government claims that its purpose is to enhance trust and social stability by creating a “culture of sincerity” that will “restore social trust.”
What it will actually create, of course, is a culture of fear and a nation of informants.
This is because one of the ways that people can improve their own social credit score is to report on the supposed misdeeds of others.
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Western criticism of the new system has been intense, with Human Rights Watch describing it as “chilling.”
In response, Chinese Communist Party publications scoff that Westerners are simply too unsophisticated to understand the wonders of the new system.
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It is China’s ancient totalitarian impulse — the absolute rule of the god-emperor over his subjects — brought into the modern age. It is George Orwell’s prophetic “1984” come alive.
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Not content to incarcerate its own population in a virtual prison, China is busily hawking its creation to like-minded socialist dictatorships. Maduro’s Venezuela was China’s first customer.
- Discussion
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Steven W. Mosher is the president of the Population Research Institute and the author of “Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order,” out now.
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