As usual I’m turning to lemmy to get answers/resources on this before I make assumptions and do further reading myself.
Holidays have started and with that comes family discussions on topics such as China having a socials points system which dictates (apparently) everything from you being able to buy a house or enrolling your child into a good school.
Is this true or not? I’ve heard mixed responses and would love more explanations.
Ok, so when people talk about the “Social Credit” system, they usually mean some combination of two things:
The first one is Alibaba’s opt-in credit scoring system that functions similarly to the credit scores in the US, they basically measure how much you spend and borrow, and whether you repay your loans on time or not. It’s completely optional and offers discounts and other perks in Alibaba’s ecosystem with a high score.
The second is a system that is primarily designed to enforce regulations on buisnesses. Back in the early 2000s, there were a bunch of health scandals around Chinese dairy companies and other food products, as well as corporate corruption and lack of transparency more generally. So this “Social Credit” basically measures how compliant and transparent these companies are. Originally it was debated on whether it should be extended to individuals, but that basically never materialized.
These have nothing to do with each other, but people in the west often combine the two and make some weird extrapolations to make it sound all encompassing, when it really isn’t. In fact, a study (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444819826402) showed that 80% of Chinese citizens approved of the Social Credit system, and only 1% expressed any disapproval at all.
from what i understand, a watered-down version was briefly trialed in a couple of cities but abandoned