A Comparison of “Social Credit” Systems Across Rural and Urban China: Rural Points, Civilized Cities, and Financial Creditworthiness

Autor(en)

Alexander Trauth-Goik, Carolyn Hsu, Jian Lu

Abstrakt

In 2014, China’s State Council announced the “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System”, which laid out a plan to establish a national Social Credit System (SCS) by the end of 2020. Although this system was largely designed to exert government control over corporations, international journalists and scholars focused on the SCS’s planned surveillance and assessment of citizens. According to the plan, the SCS would create a master database of information on citizen and business behavior, implement a punishment and rewards system to encourage good behavior, and set up blacklists to publicly shame malefactors. International journalists and scholars reacted to the plan with concerns that China’s SCS represented an ominous new level of central state control over citizens. Outside of China, the assumption was that the purpose of the SCS was to compel citizen obedience to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
A decade later, it has become clear that neither of these assumptions has come to fruition. Although the myth of a national, centralized, all-encompassing, AI-driven system of social control in China persists in public discourse, this has been thoroughly debunked by scholarship. There is no national, centralized system of surveillance/social credit in the People’s Republic of China, but instead a multiplicity of citizen-based point systems, usually run at the local level. This paper asks:
• Empirically, what do different types of citizen-based point systems look like in China? What kinds of behaviors are incentivized and sanctioned? What are the mechanisms of rewards and punishments?
• What purposes do the citizen-based point systems serve? What types of citizens are they trying to engineer?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of these citizen-based point systems at achieving these goals?
This research employs a mixed methods approach combining analysis of 122 state media reports with fieldwork in a village in Beijing with a point system. We find a variety of local systems often run at the village or urban subdistrict level, and they are implemented and managed by different types of government organizations. Our analysis reveals that the purpose of the citizen-based point systems in our sample has not been to compel obedience through rewards and punishments. Instead, it has been to inculcate civic virtue and encourage civic participation. The goal is not a passive and submissive citizenry, but an active and civically engaged one. This paper argues that the mission of citizen-based point systems has been to solve the problem of insufficient social capital and social cohesion through incentives and technology.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften

Externe Organisation(en)

Colgate University, China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL)

Publikationsdatum

2025

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

509026 Digitalisierungsforschung, 508008 Medienanalyse, 506010 Politikfeldanalyse

Schlagwörter

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/77ad3da2-bf36-4ce7-9c5d-96ec497c5261