China's "Sesame Credit" System: The Ultimate Mass Control Tool

Tencent is one of the largest corporations in the world; it owns China’s Internet and mobile communications along with its two biggest social media platforms, Weibo and QQ. Internationally, it owns Blizzard, Epic Games and Alibaba, which is slowly consolidating as the world's largest site for auctions and sales.

Tencent and the Chinese government are, together, creating a system called Sesame Credit, which will launch in 2020, and control all of China’s networks in an omnipresent manner.

Sesame Credit is like a colossal score game. It tracks absolutely everything you search, post, comment or read on the Internet. With this information you either earn or lose points. Points for what? Points that measure how good a citizen you are. For example, if you share information provided by the government’s News Channel, your Sesame Credit goes up. If you share news from independent media, especially those that are not favourable to the government, your Sesame Credit drops. The system of course has access to Alibaba, so if you buy things made in China your credit goes up, if you buy or support foreign products, including those of the entertainment industry, your credit falls. If you dare to post a negative opinion of the communist party, your score deteriorates massively. 

But what is done with these points is the most terrifying part of all. If you have high credit, you can receive many benefits, such as the speeding up of your personal bureaucratic paperwork, as well as greater ease to obtain bank loans. If, on the contrary, your Sesame score is low, you’ll lose all of these privileges. At the same time, you will receive punishments such as lower Internet speed and the inability of viewing job ads.

The scores of each citizen will be entirely public—a sinister method which not only promotes civil obedience but also motivates public rejection, induced by the fear that, by having friends with low scores, yours decreases as well.