[noemon]

The complicated truth about China's social credit system
China's social credit system isn't a world first but when it's complete it will be unique. The system isn't just as simple as everyone being given a score though

By NICOLE KOBIE

Friday 7 June 2019

Kevin Hong
China's social credit system has been compared to Black Mirror, Big Brother and every other dystopian future sci-fi writers can think up. The reality is more complicated — and in some ways, worse.

The idea for social credit came about back in 2007, with projects announced by the government as an opt-in system in 2014. But there's a difference between the official government system and private, corporate versions, though the latter's scoring system that includes shopping habits and friendships is often conflated with the former.

Brits are well accustomed to credit checks: data brokers such as Experian trace the timely manner in which we pay our debts, giving us a score that's used by lenders and mortgage providers. We also have social-style scores, and anyone who has shopped online with eBay has a rating on shipping times and communication, while Uber drivers and passengers both rate each other; if your score falls too far, you're out of luck.

China's social credit system expands that idea to all aspects of life, judging citizens' behaviour and trustworthiness. Caught jaywalking, don't pay a court bill, play your music too loud on the train — you could lose certain rights, such as booking a flight or train ticket. "The idea itself is not a Chinese phenomenon," says Mareike Ohlberg, research associate at the Mercator Institute for China Studies. Nor is the use, and abuse, of aggregated data for analysis of behaviour. "But if [the Chinese system] does come together as envisioned, it would still be something very unique," she says. "It's both unique and part of a global trend."

What is China's social credit system?
Unveiled in a 2014 plan, pieces of the system are already in place, and the Chinese government appears to be targeting a 2020 goal to get the rest in place, though that's less a deadline and instead marks the end of a planning period, says Samantha Hoffman, non-resident fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

As yet, there's no one social credit system. Instead, local governments have their own social record systems that work differently, while unofficial private versions are operated at companies such Ant Financial's Zhima Credit, better known as Sesame Credit. Ant Financial is the payment firm spun out of Alibaba. The systems use shopping habits among other data to inform credit-style scores, on an opt-in basis. "There is no single, nationally coordinated system," Ohlberg says. And the pilots that do exist don't all work in the same way.

The private systems, including Ant Financial's Sesame Credit, often get conflated with the government plans, though they aren't part of the official system. To be a bit more confusing, the data collected by private companies is expected to be hoovered up by the government in the future, and some of the data is already used in government trials. Sesame Credit says this is only with user consent.

That leads to misunderstanding of what the social credit system actually is, notes Ohlberg. "What happened is some of the media took the private pilots, like Sesame Credit… and presented it as the social credit system," she says. It's not officially part of the system, and doesn't have a license; though the pilot is approved, and indeed encouraged, it could one day be shut down by the government. "It kind of rides on the fashion for social credit."

What's troubling is when those private systems link up to the government rankings — which is already happening with some pilots, she says. "You'll have sort of memorandum of understanding like arrangements between the city and, say, Alibaba and Tencent about data exchanges and including that in assessments of citizens," Ohlberg adds. That's a lot of data being collected with little protection, and no algorithmic transparency about how it's analysed to spit out a score or ranking, though Sesame does share some details about what types of data is used.

How does the social credit system work?
The target, eventually, is that the government system will be country wide, with businesses given a "unified social credit code" and citizens an identity number, all linked to permanent record. "If you go to a credit China website, and you have an entity's credit code, you can type that in and pull up credit records," explains Hoffman. "Individuals will have ID-linked codes." It's less a score, she says, and more of a record.

Some reports talk about a blacklist; that's part of the official government social credit system, which means if you owe the government money, for example, you could lose certain rights. There's a difference between getting a low social credit score and being blacklisted by the government, such as for refusing to pay a fine.

The criteria that go into a social credit ranking depends on where you are, notes Ohlberg. "It's according to which place you're in, because they have their own catalogs," she says. It can range from not paying fines when you're deemed fully able to, misbehaving on a train, standing up a taxi, or driving through a red light.

One city, Rongcheng, gives all residents 1,000 points to start. Authorities make deductions for bad behaviour like traffic violations, and add points for good behaviour such as donating to charity. One regulation Ohlberg recently read specifically addresses stealing electricity. Of course, you'll have to get caught first or be reported by someone else. While facial recognition is infamously used to spot jaywalkers, in some cities it's not so automated, Ohlberg notes.

Private projects, such as Sesame Credit, hoover up all sorts of data on its 400 million customers, from how much time they spend playing video games (that's bad) to whether they're a parent (that's good). That can be shared with other companies. One infamous example is Sesame Credit linking up with the Baihe dating site, so would be partners can judge each other on their looks as well as their social credit score; that system is opt-in.

So far, taking part in both the private and government versions is technically voluntary; in the future, the official social credit system will be mandatory. That said, there's plenty of pressure to take part now. "There are incentives for participating, and disincentives for not participating," Hoffman notes.

What happens if you're blacklisted?
Liu Hu is a journalist in China, writing about censorship and government corruption. Because of his work, Liu has been arrested and fined — and blacklisted. Liu found he was named on a List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement by the Supreme People's Court as "not qualified" to buy a plane ticket, and banned from travelling some train lines, buying property, or taking out a loan.

"There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to," he told The Globe and Mail. "What's really scary is there's nothing you can do about it. You can report to no one. You are stuck in the middle of nowhere."

What recourse is there? With the government system, if you want to be removed from a blacklist, you can either pay your bill or appeal to the court, says Jing Zeng, a researcher at the University of Zurich. "Bring your money to the court and then you get removed from the system," she says. "It's not a judicial system by itself, it's still the court you need to [appeal to]."

However, the Chinese justice system leaves much to be desired, says Hoffman. "There are no genuine protections for the people and entities subject to the system," she says.

"In China there is no such thing as the rule of law. Regulations that can be largely apolitical on the surface can be political when the Communist Party of China (CCP) decides to use them for political purposes." In April 2018, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) sent letters to international airlines demanding they show Taiwan as part of China, saying the government would "make a record of your company's serious dishonesty and take disciplinary actions" for any that didn't comply; they all eventually did. The system used to pressure the airlines was a pilot of the Civil Aviation Industry Credit Measures, which is part of the official social credit system.

Alongside the potential for abuse of power, the knock-on effects of statewide surveillance, and the likelihood of incorrect data, Ohlberg notes the a few bad marks on a social credit record could spark a negative spiral.

While it varies by programme, in some local pilots a positive rating means discounts and benefits, such as a simplified process with bureaucracies. If you have a low rating, you may have extra paperwork or fees. "Once you're in a low category, it makes it difficult," she says. "I see a huge potential for negative spiral." Such a system could further divide society, creating classes of people depending on their social credit — and this is where comparisons to Black Mirror pop up.

Why is China building this?
It's all about building trust, says the Chinese government. The 2014 document describing the government's plans note that as "trust-keeping is insufficiently rewarded, the costs of breaking trust tend to be low."

And Chinese society does have trust issues, says Ohlberg, be it food quality scandal, pollution, or employees not paying their workers. "But the system can also be used to enforce vague laws like endangering national security or unity," she adds. Zeng says that can include food safety and product quality, major problems in the country. "It's a big problem in Chinese society," she says. "They are punishing companies for this kind of bad behaviour."

Plus, it could help build alternative means of financial credit, says Ohlberg, as many people in China live outside financial systems, so have no trustworthy credit rating. "Some of the earlier pilots of the social credit system that preceded the major policy plan that was published in 2014, were actually building a social credit system for the countryside," she says. "The majority of people there wouldn't have financial banking data on them." For businesses, a social credit system could also be used for micro enterprises, which couldn't be assessed with traditional criteria.

Hoffman isn't buying that argument, saying such a system is about government power. "If solving problems was the real goal, the CCP would not need social credit to do it," she says. "China’s social credit system is a state-driven program designed to do one thing, to uphold and expand the Chinese Communist Party’s power."

She adds that social credit is a tech-enabled way to tie political power to social and economic development that's been discussed in the country since the 1980s, an automation of Chairman Mao's Mass Line — a term to describe how the party's leadership shaped and managed society. "In Mao’s China, the Mass Line relied on ideological mass mobilisation, using Mao Zedong’s personal charisma, to force participation," Hoffman says. "The CCP could no longer, after the Mao era, rely on ideological mobilisation as the primary tool for operationalising social management."

Is there more than social credit?
China's social credit scheme is developing, but it is only one part of the country's surveillance state. As well as tight controls on the web content which is available, through the country's national firewall, there is monitoring and censorship of social media.

Ahead of the 30-year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests researchers at the University of Hong Kong found that critical posts on the social networks of Weibo and Wechat were removed. Leading video platforms also all simultaneously turned off comments saying system upgrades were needed. There have also been crackdowns on the use of VPNs, which can help protect people's privacy online.

The country has developed advanced facial recognition systems that are able to follow people across entire cities. In a show of power at the end of 2017, Chinese officials working in co-operation with BBC News showed how it could track down and find one of the organisation's reporters within seven minutes. The movements of journalist John Sudworth were monitored as the country's network of 170 million CCTV cameras was leveraged to follow him.

More worryingly, the region of Xinjiang, in the north west of the country has become a test bed for China's vast digital control operations. In particular, the largely Muslim minority of Uighur people has been subjected to increased surveillance and discrimination. It has been uncovered that more than 500,000 face scans of Uighurs have been conducted.

What does this mean for China?
The full extent of the impact on social credit to Chinese citizens is impossible to say, simply because the system doesn't fully exist yet. Zeng suggests the reality is somewhere between the government's claims and the Western media's description of horror-filled dystopias. "It's a very like a baby step," she said of the work that's happened so far.

Ohlberg agrees that early reporting had multiple errors that led to misunderstandings of the system — but that doesn't mean social credit isn't dangerous. "It's somewhere between the people who say the media coverage is inaccurate and that means it's not so bad and the people who see this huge dystopia," she says. "You have to find this space between that were you can explain it is actually quite scary, even if it's not quite the way it's portrayed."

Because of that, no other country should be considering this idea, says Hoffman. "The west should not copy any aspect of social credit," Hoffman says. "Often comparisons are drawn between private applications like Uber and its rating system for customers and drivers. While these private company systems are extremely problematic in my view, they are fundamentally different. The People’s Republic of China is an authoritarian country, the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for gross human rights violations for decades— just look at the example of Xinjiang now. There is nothing any liberal democratic society should even think about copying in the social credit system."

[Igor Antunov]

I'll just leave this seething hypocrisy right here for reference:

[noemon]

Seething hypocrisy is when people like you throw some idiotic picture and hope the shit sticks. Lack of context is for desperate propaganda trolls.

First, do you agree with this technology or not?

Edit: Oh sorry, I forgot that shoot and run trolls do not actually discuss anything.

So let's break it down for the rest.

The WSJ article refers to a private company collecting pictures for facial recognition, the EU, US and our democratic parliaments will regulate this industry just like they did with GDPR, and if not on their own accord, we will force them to.

No Chinese person can force China to do anything, because no-one is enfranchised. The Chinese constitution officially describes China as a dictatorship and as such China's social credit system is totally under the control of an official dictatorship that answers to nobody.

In our societies, the companies that are collecting and collating our data are subject to the regulation by our governments and parliaments.

In Europe, there is very strong regulation against the collection of our personal data, much stronger than in China.

[Rancid]

China is shaping up to be a real shit hole.

[Igor Antunov]

Seething hypocrisy is when people like you throw some idiotic picture and hope the shit sticks. Lack of context is for desperate propaganda trolls.

First, do you agree with this technology or not?

Edit: Oh sorry, I forgot that shoot and run trolls do not actually discuss anything.

So let's break it down for the rest.

The WSJ article refers to a private company collecting pictures for facial recognition, the EU, US and our democratic parliaments will regulate this industry just like they did with GDPR, and if not on their own accord, we will force them to.

No Chinese person can force China to do anything, because no-one is enfranchised. The Chinese constitution officially describes China as a dictatorship and as such China's social credit system is totally under the control of an official dictatorship that answers to nobody.

In our societies, the companies that are collecting and collating our data are subject to the regulation by our governments and parliaments.

In Europe, there is very strong regulation against the collection of our personal data, much stronger than in China.

Chinese government fears its people the most of all governments on earth. All it can do is please them by improving heir life expectancy and quality of life on a daily basis.

And yes I support a social credit score in countries like China, that have their shit together. In America it would be a disaster, because half the country despises and grants no mandate to whatever party is in power. In China support for government is over 80% at all times. This has been independently verified: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/ ... isfaction/

[Fasces]

IN OCTOBER 2018, Vice President Mike Pence paid a visit to the Hudson Institute—a conservative Washington, DC, think tank—to give a wide-ranging speech about the United States’ relationship with China. Standing stiffly in a shiny blue tie, he began by accusing the Chinese Communist Party of interfering in US politics and directing Chinese businesses to steal American intellectual property by “any means necessary.” Pence then turned his attention to the country’s human rights abuses, starting not with the persecution of religious minorities, but with a peculiar governmental initiative: the social credit project. “By 2020, China’s rulers aim to implement an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life—the so-called ‘social credit score,’” Pence said. “In the words of that program’s official blueprint, it will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.’”

The vice president’s remarks echoed a steady stream of Western media reports, published in dozens of outlets over the past few years, that paint China’s Social Credit System as a dystopian nightmare straight out of Black Mirror. The articles and broadcast segments often said China’s central government is using a futuristic algorithm to compile people’s social media connections, buying histories, location data, and more into a single score dictating their rights and freedoms. The government can supposedly analyze footage from hundreds of millions of facial-recognition-equipped surveillance cameras in real time, and then dock you points for misbehavior like jaywalking or playing too many video games.

But there is no single, all-powerful score assigned to every individual in China, at least not yet. The “official blueprint” Pence referenced is a planning document released by China’s chief administrative body five years ago. It calls for the establishment of a nationwide scheme for tracking the trustworthiness of everyday citizens, corporations, and government officials. The Chinese government and state media say the project is designed to boost public confidence and fight problems like corruption and business fraud. Western critics often see social credit instead as an intrusive surveillance apparatus for punishing dissidents and infringing on people’s privacy.

With just over a year to go until the government’s self-imposed deadline for establishing the laws and regulations governing social credit, Chinese legal researchers say the system is far from the cutting-edge, Big Brother apparatus portrayed in the West’s popular imagination. “I really think you would find a much larger percentage of Americans are aware of Chinese social credit than you would find Chinese people are aware of Chinese social credit,” says Jeremy Daum, a senior research fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center in Beijing. The system as it exists today is more a patchwork of regional pilots and experimental projects, with few indications about what could be implemented at a national scale.

That’s not to say that fears about social credit are entirely unfounded. The Chinese government is already using new technologies to control its citizens in frightening ways. The internet is highly censored, and each person’s cell phone number and online activity is assigned a unique ID number tied to their real name. Facial-recognition technology is also increasingly widespread in China, with few restraints on how it can be used to track and surveil citizens. The most troubling abuses are being carried out in the western province of Xinjiang, where human rights groups and journalists say the Chinese government is detaining and surveilling millions of people from the minority Muslim Uyghur population on a nearly unprecedented scale.

But Western concerns about what could happen with China’s Social Credit System have in some ways outstripped discussions about what's already really occurring. Critiques are often based on worst-case scenarios far off in the future, and run the risk of minimizing the troubling aspects of the project as it is in place today. The exaggerated portrayals may also help to downplay surveillance efforts in other parts of the world. “Because China is often held up as the extreme of one end of a spectrum, I think that it moves the goalposts for the whole conversation,” says Daum. “So that anything less invasive than our imagined version of social credit seems sort of acceptable, because at least we’re not as bad as China.”

One of the earliest Western accounts was published by an unlikely source: the American Civil Liberties Union, which doesn’t operate in China. As part of his job as a policy analyst at the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, Jay Stanley blogs about emerging threats to civil liberties. On October 5, 2015, he published a post titled “China’s Nightmarish Citizen Scores Are a Warning for Americans.” The article is representative of much of the initial wave of coverage, which was often derived from secondhand information that traveled like a game of telephone, rather than on-the-ground reporting. Stanley’s post was sourced largely from a similar story from Privacy News Online, which itself was based on an article from a Swedish website.

Today Stanley says he intended to highlight China’s program as a cautionary tale for the US. “This really seemed to be pointing the way towards a dark potential future,” he says. “There were frankly a lot of signs and similarities to things happening in the United States,” like digital profiling. The ACLU post wasn’t the only outlet to use China’s nascent system as a way to draw attention to privacy and surveillance issues in the West. “The more I look around, the more it seems like an American social credit system is springing up around us—and it doesn’t look all that different from China’s,” Casey Newton, a writer at The Verge, wrote in his popular newsletter just last month. "China's Dystopian Tech Could Be Contagious," The Atlantic similarly declared last year.

While a number of journalists and academics have tried to correct the record, the science fiction myths about China’s social credit score continue to endure in the West. “There’s so much that’s been written about this now that’s wrong, that it’s really taken on a life of its own,” says Shazeda Ahmed, a PhD student at the University of California at Berkeley studying the Social Credit System in China. “I still see articles quoting things from 2014, 2015, that I thought were largely debunked.”

The confusion is understandable, though. First, there’s the language barrier. Daum says the phrase “social credit,” has different connotations in English that it does in Chinese. To an English speaker, the two words together might signal a reference to interpersonal relationships. In Chinese, the term is more closely associated with a phrase like “public trust.” There’s also the added linguistic hurdle of deciphering dense legal documents. “I think language is a real barrier,” says Daum. “Both legal jargon and political jargon and Chinese versus English.”

The original plan for social credit released in 2014 is also vague and sweeping, and it wasn’t entirely clear what the project might ultimately consist of. “They expected the different parts of the government, both centrally and locally, to try out their own approach in terms of implementation,” says Xin Dai, a professor and associate dean at China’s Ocean University Law School, who has researched social credit. “You have this really massive but also chaotic scene of different people trying to put together different types of programs.”

For example, the government partnered with corporations on some early initiatives, including “credit scores” calculated by private tech companies, like Ant Financial’s Sesame Credit program. In 2015 the Chinese government authorized eight tech companies, including Ant Financial, an affiliate of the corporate giant Alibaba, to experiment with developing credit reporting systems for individuals. In addition to financial data, Sesame Credit does take into consideration things like social media connections and purchasing habits—a product feature that garnered a lot of attention in the West, including in a WIRED cover story.

By 2017, the Chinese government had decided that none of the pilots would receive authorization to be official credit reporting measures, due to concerns about potential conflicts of interest. But initially, it was unclear how closely tied the programs would be to the government’s efforts, even in China. “I think there were, and maybe still are, Chinese citizens who didn’t quite understand that there was a difference as well,” says Ahmed. “Because in the beginning, Sesame Credit was marketing itself as contributing to the whole Social Credit System.”

Today, Sesame Credit, as well as other similar initiatives, essentially function like loyalty rewards programs. Participants with high scores earn privileges like renting a bike without leaving a deposit or deferring payment for medical expenses, but the scores are not part of the legal system, and no one is required to participate.

The state-run projects that have captured the most attention in the West are the local pilots. Dozens of Chinese cities are experimenting with their own versions of social credit, and some have designed programs that do give individuals a personal numerical ranking. These initiatives largely don’t rely on mass surveillance or supercharged artificial intelligence, and many citizens may not even know they exist. It’s difficult to generalize about all of them, since they can vary widely. Some are incorporating blockchain technology, for example. For now it’s not clear when, if ever, any of them will be adopted at the national level.

The city of Rongcheng, about 500 miles from Beijing, is one place assigning residents individual social credit scores. According to policy documents outlining the project that Daum translated, it’s relatively limited in scope. In order to lose points in the system, you would need to violate an existing law, regulation, or contract you entered. Maintaining “Exceptional Creditworthiness” is thus a matter of following the rules already in place. The benefits of maintaining a high score are also fairly modest, like free health checkups and the ability to apply for an interest-free loan. “Looking at how fragmented this implementation is, you see that different governments don’t have quite the same resources,” says Ahmed. “Some of the smaller cities, they can only subsidize fairly unexciting benefits.”

The primary mechanism of the Social Credit System are the nationwide blacklists and red lists. Each regulatory agency was asked to come up with a rap sheet of its worst offenders, businesses and individuals who violated preexisting industry regulations. The red lists are the exact opposite—they’re rosters of companies and people that have been particularly compliant. Those archives were then made public on a centralized website, called China Credit, where anyone can search them. Think of the Better Business Bureau, or letter grades given to restaurants.

Many regulatory agencies have signed memorandums of understanding with each other, in which they promise to punish people and businesses on one another’s blacklists. Hypothetically, if this system were in the US, a business might now face additional penalties from the Environmental Protection Agency for breaking a rule at the Food and Drug Administration. There’s no evidence that citizens’ social media or purchasing data is being incorporated, at least not yet. “They’re making it so that these records are communicated to other agencies,” says Daum. “Somehow, that got interpreted as everything you do is being watched all the time in a panopticon, and that I have not seen.”

Chinese legal researchers are worried about one of these databases in particular: The Supreme People’s Court maintains a blacklist of people who the government alleges did not comply with court judgments, for example by not paying fines, but also things like failing to formally apologize to someone they are found to have wronged. Being on the blacklist now comes with harsh punishments. You might be unable to purchase high-speed train tickets, fly on an airplane, or send your kids to a private school. Over 13 million people were on the list as of March, according to state reports, and the government has prohibited more than 20 million plane tickets from being purchased.

Yu-Jie Chen, a Taiwanese human rights lawyer and post-doctoral researcher at the Institutum Iurisprudentiae of Academia Sinica, says the judgement defaulter’s blacklist is imposing “layers of disproportionate, arbitrary, and wide-ranging punishments,” on people who have largely already suffered the consequences of breaking the law. She says she’s also worried about how the list penalizes people who didn’t commit any offense, like a child who is barred from attending certain schools because of their parent’s actions. It’s not clear whether citizens can effectively get off the list if they’re included on it by accident, or even if they fulfill their court-ordered obligations.

To enforce these punishments, Ahmed has written that the government is sharing blacklists with technology platforms. That way, people on them can’t do things like book flights or buy train tickets online. Local governments are also asking social media companies to help orchestrate public shaming initiatives. In the southern city of Nanning, the social media app Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) partnered with the local court to broadcast photos of blacklisted people between videos, like a digital mugshot. In the northern city of Shijiazhuang, blacklisted people and entities are displayed on a map within the messaging app WeChat. The features aren’t yet widespread, but still raise privacy concerns, especially if people are wrongfully added to a blacklist and that information is then broadcast to everyone they know.

As the 2020 deadline approaches, China’s Social Credit System still remains largely in development. There are some signs, however, that the system could soon incorporate more forms of data collection. For example, Chen says, the China Credit website already encourages users to log in by scanning their faces, though it’s not mandatory. “So there will be a facial-recognition element if the government can persuade people to use that more,” she explains.

In the meantime, Dai says, Chinese academics have begun discussing the potential privacy and other risks posed by the project. They were influenced, in part, by the enormous amount of attention the Social Credit System has garnered in the West, despite the fact that it often hasn’t been portrayed accurately. “This entire thing is just so massive, and it varies across place to place” says Dai. “It is easy to sort of misinterpret or only catch part of it, without seeing the entire picture.”

https://www.wired.com/story/china-socia ... re-system/

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/0 ... it-sounds/

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/ch ... isnt-real/

We can either discuss what is real, or what isn't, but let's be clear about what social credit is and isn't.

China places limits on what criminals can do. Is this a social credit system? American parolees can't vote, can't leave the state (can't buy air or bus tickets to that effect), are subject to random searches and drug tests - is this a social credit system? If so, it rivals the worst of what China does so far. Insurance companies can determine premiums based on your Instagram posts - is that a social credit system? They share databases of user data between platforms. Americans can be denied government jobs based on debt and poor credit - is your FICO score a social credit system? Is the Better Business Bureau a social credit system?

The American Social Credit System

[Odiseizam]

[1][1]

now go be dissident in China, even for coughing in wrong place points will be chop off
the problem is not how and why this will go in cities but in rural areas
at least there should be room for some freedom!?

What's Your Social Credit Score? ~ Truthstream Media
https://youtu.be/wP321Miy7zQ

[Rugoz]

China is shaping up to be a real shit hole.

Dystopian nightmare you mean.

[Patrickov]

the problem is not how and why this will go in cities but in rural areas
at least there should be room for some freedom!?

You have no idea of how megalomaniacal Chinese rulers can be.

[Rancid]

China will spark the next global war. Likely with an invasion of Taiwan.

[Julian658]

China is shaping up to be a real shit hole.

That was a Trumpian comment, just sayin'

[Rancid]

That was a Trumpian comment, just sayin'

STOP THE STEAL!!!

Also, Trump and trumpist like to falsely claim themselves as anti-war. So how is this Trumpian?

Perhaps this is new to you, but I constantly bash China (well, really the CCP).

CCP = scum

Sounds like you've fallen for the right wing propaganda that non-Trumpists are all CCP bootlickers.

I heard Biden took his oath of office in Mandarin.

[Patrickov]

non-Trumpists are all CCP bootlickers (not)

They do not have to be themselves. China will ensure that both sides are. Trumpists for their stupidity, and anti-Trumpists for their reason and predictability.

Unless someone can provoke China into a destructive war I see absolutely no hope.

[Potemkin]

They do not have to be themselves. China will ensure that both sides are. Trumpists for their stupidity, and anti-Trumpists for their reason and predictability.

Unless someone can provoke China into a destructive war I see absolutely no hope.

Some day, just like Winston Smith, you will learn acceptance, @Patrickov....

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself.

He loved Big Brother.

[Rancid]

Unless someone can provoke China into a destructive war I see absolutely no hope.

I don't think they will need to be provoked, they will start the war themselves. hell, just yesterday China said that an Independent Taiwan means war. They are already beating the war drum. Priming their populace for war. I wonder if hubris will be their downfall.

Unfortunately, in order for the world to form a unified front against them, we need to sit by idle and let them start the war. We have to let it get worse before there could be enough multinational support to do anything meaningful.

[Robert Urbanek]

The smug dystopian assessment of China’s social credit system ignores a basic question: Have the Chinese found a way to deter and/or punish antisocial behavior without an expensive system of police, courts and prisons?

[Unthinking Majority]

The smug dystopian assessment of China’s social credit system ignores a basic question: Have the Chinese found a way to deter and/or punish antisocial behavior without an expensive system of police, courts and prisons?

Maybe there's a debate in this topic somewhere. The problem is China has essentially created 1984, and they throw whoever they want in prison anyways, then with the prisoners whose race/culture/religion they don't like they sterilize them or make them slave the cotton fields or harvest their organs for profit.

[Rancid]

Maybe there's a debate in this topic somewhere. The problem is China has essentially created 1984, and they throw whoever they want in prison anyways, then with the prisoners whose race/culture/religion they don't like they sterilize them or make them slave the cotton fields or harvest their organs for profit.

I think the reason they can get away with this is for the same reason Stalin was able to kill 20million+ people. It's all happening within their own borders. They know this too of course. It's like having that neighbor you know is beating on his wife, but everyone just stands by because he said "mind your own fucking business."... Also, he's fucking crazy and unhinged.

[Unthinking Majority]

I don't think they will need to be provoked, they will start the war themselves. hell, just yesterday China said that an Independent Taiwan means war. They are already beating the war drum. Priming their populace for war. I wonder if hubris will be their downfall.

Unfortunately, in order for the world to form a unified front against them, we need to sit by idle and let them start the war. We have to let it get worse before there could be enough multinational support to do anything meaningful.

They're starting to flex their muscle within their own sphere of influence. Only a matter of time before they're more involved in military matters internationally that affect them. So far Russia is their useful idiot pawn they get to do the dirty work. China has been much more focused on infiltrating countries across the globe through covert operations, greasing palms, and legal purchases of land/resources/companies.

I think beyond Hong Kong and Taiwan, war would be a major strategic error for China, and they aren't that dumb.

Biden has already talked about forming a united front with other democracies to check China's power/abuse, which is good news: https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-trum ... 1609945027

[Unthinking Majority]

I think the reason they can get away with this is for the same reason Stalin was able to kill 20million+ people. It's all happening within their own borders. They know this too of course. It's like having that neighbor you know is beating on his wife, but everyone just stands by because he said "mind your own fucking business."... Also, he's fucking crazy and unhinged.

There isn't much we can even do about it even if we wanted to.