China's Social Credit System: A Warning To Us All, Not An Exotic Dystopia

Reports abound on China’s fledgling social credit system, but there is a problem with how the media are dealing with this worrying use of big data.

No doubt the social credit system deserves our attention—it promises to draw data from individuals' social and financial activity in order to award scores, and to restrict access to transport, social housing and employment for those given low ratings. 

However, as the authors of a piece published in May this year argue, “Social credit is … seen as signalling the onset of a dystopian future that could only exist in the Chinese context.” In other words, we should be paying attention to the development of a system designed to harness algorithms for social engineering because it could be a harbinger of what is to come:

If Chinese experiments are successful, they will certainly serve as a model for many other countries; authoritarian regimes, democratic systems with authoritarian tendencies, and eventually democracies that struggle to maintain legitimacy in an increasingly polarised and fragmented political landscape.

In this essay, Nicholas Loubere and Stefan Brehm argue that the social credit system shouldn’t be seen as exclusive to China, but as part of the global trend towards the financialization of everyday life:

China’s social credit resonates with the global financial inclusion project, which seeks to integrate marginal and impoverished populations into the global capitalist system—primarily through expanded access to credit—as a means of promoting economic development and social empowerment.

By describing the social credit system solely in terms of its relationship to authoritarianism, much of the news coverage has failed to see how it is linked to broader trends outside of China, and is therefore a concern for us all.