China is trying to shut people up. In different ways. How does the social trust system work?

Attempts to build a Chinese system of surveillance and assessing citizens have been known for years. The authoritarian authorities of the Middle Kingdom consider it the key to raising an obedient and disciplined society.

Carrot and stick principle. Being rude doesn’t pay off

The plan to build an independent system of rewarding citizens was officially announced by China in 2014. It was known as the Social Credit System and was intended to reward (and control) every Chinese citizen by 2020. Initially, mainly to assess his creditworthiness, but it is clear that the Chinese authorities see much greater opportunities in this type of activity.

However, local tests of similar initiatives had already been developed before, and some ideas are still used today. For example, in 2005, the Chinese created the Skynet system, which, based on hundreds of millions of cameras (170 million in 2017, but their number was constantly growing) and facial recognition technology, was supposed to track the activities of up to 1.3 billion citizens. The Chinese are still under surveillance on a large scale by public surveillance cameras.

In 2013, with 700,000 Rongcheng residents also set up a system that gives each resident a personal initial credit score of 1,000 points. Points were deducted from citizens for bad deeds (e.g. stowaways or speeding), and points were added for glorious ones (e.g. participation in competitions organized by the city).

The lucky ones with a large number of points had no problems with installment purchases or taking a loan. Similar attempts were later repeated in other cities, and even implemented by private companies. Many initiatives were inspired by the Sesame Credit system of the Alibaba holding company (the owner of AliExpress), which evaluates customers based on their purchase history or online behavior.

As the scientific writes, a centralized and automated system for evaluating citizens has ultimately not been created. There is no government database to which the smallest information about each citizen would be automatically added, and no powerful algorithm that would evaluate this data and add or subtract points from Chinese citizens. There is not even any scoring of the actions of the Chinese.

Which does not mean that the Chinese authorities are not planning to build such a system in the future, or that they are not invigilating and “remembering” information about citizens now. Contrary. Residents of China have been tracked and monitored on a massive scale for years, and the Chinese ruling party regularly uses such data to make the lives of “disobedient” Chinese citizens miserable. The goal is to show that disobedience to authority does not pay off for a typical Chinese.

The “MIT Technology Review” describes that the system that has actually been implemented is surprisingly low tech. It is mainly based on the exchange of data between various Chinese government agencies and security services. However, this dirty work, i.e. collecting and processing data on the Chinese, is done by people. According to a report by the Beijing-based consulting company Trivium China, cited by the magazine, no case of automatic collection of information and imposition of a fine on a citizen has been recorded so far. People are always involved in this process.

Are you taking part in protests? As a punishment, you will not buy train and plane tickets

This is also shown by the ongoing protests in China against the extremely restrictive “zero Covid” policy. Still relatively few (compared to the gigantic population), but still the largest since 1989, when protests took place in Tiananmen Square. Hundreds or thousands of Chinese people in many cities took to the streets to protest the Covid restrictions and the authoritarian rule of the Chinese Communist Party.

The authorities are deaf to the demands of the citizens. They have been tracking and suppressing the protests. Not only by force, but also with the help of new technologies. The services use from the complete surveillance of the Chinese internet to determine potential protest locations. conducted, for example, in the means of public transport, phone checks of citizens (similar to what happened in Russia during the anti-war protests).

Videos have appeared online showing how Chinese people traveling on the subway allow the police to browse the contents of their smartphones without any objection (which seems unthinkable to us Europeans). One can guess that every case of citizens’ insubordination towards the services or finding content unwelcome by the state is meticulously recorded.

Censorship is also active. that censors are combing the web and removing protest symbols and information from it, which is supposed to make gatherings more difficult. Officials also visit the homes of potential protesters to warn them against participating, or face severe consequences.

Anyway, it does not end with warning and dispersing the protesters. It is also about discouraging opposition from those who have already taken to the streets once. According to reports, the police services are sending summons or taking people from their homes for questioning who had previously taken part in the protests. One can guess that apart from the painstaking list of participants at the protest site, a Chinese monitoring system capable of recognizing the faces – and thus the identity – of the protesters plays a huge role here.

This is exactly how the Chinese “system” of surveillance and evaluation of citizens, called the system of social trust, presents itself. Those who have been recorded as disobeying authority will probably encounter numerous problems in everyday life in some time. They will not be able to buy train or plane tickets, will not be able to go on foreign holidays or enjoy many luxuries, such as enrolling their child in a good private school.

It is also worth mentioning that a centralized and completely automated system for evaluating Chinese citizens – if it is actually created – will require the construction of a huge technological infrastructure to collect, transmit, process and store gigantic amounts of data. After all, we are talking about tens of multi-million cities and a total of over 1.4 billion potential opponents of power controlled at every turn.

As he writes in another, the Chinese may already be concerned about the possibility of building such a comprehensive and technologically advanced system in the future. The Chinese government emphasizes that all punishments imposed under the social trust system must comply with applicable law, which does not mean that the law is fair to citizens.