[Fasces]

A supposedly Orwellian system is fragmented, localized, and mostly targeted at businesses.

For years, the system has made headlines worldwide as a totem of China’s ruthless techno-authoritarianism—and, indeed, it has blacklisted an estimated 10 million citizens and companies. But this global narrative has ignored that the system was never designed to be an algorithm-driven, super-scoring system. There were local scoring systems that were widely conflated with the SCS. But they were wonky initiatives at the fringes of the system that today are constrained in what they do.

The SCS’s main aim is to improve the enforcement of legal and administrative rules. Food safety scandals are a recurring problem in China, as are workplace safety issues, wage arrears, and noncompliance with contracts and court orders. When it came to tackling these problems, there were laws in place, but enforcement was lackluster, and anyone who did get caught could simply go to the next province and reoffend. The SCS was meant to help by enabling data sharing between agencies and introducing nationwide blacklists to coerce offenders into compliance. Surveillance and repression of political dissidents or minorities were left to other, more invasive initiatives, such as the Golden Shield and Sharp Eyes projects.

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Contrary to common belief, the cities mainly target companies, not individuals. Nonetheless, legal representatives of a violating company are also included in the blacklists to prevent reoffending elsewhere or under a different company. Nationally, about 75 percent of entities targeted by the system end up on blacklists because of court orders they have ignored—the so-called judgment defaulters. The remaining companies are typically collared for severe marketplace violations—for instance, for food safety infringements, environmental damage, or wage arrears. But much of these cities’ day-to-day use of the SCS is banal thanks to the system’s fragmentation and inflation of results.

Fragmentation is a symptom of central authorities being unclear about goals and how to reach them. This gives local authorities leeway to implement policies in creative or self-serving ways, producing numerous quirky experiments. During China’s first COVID-19 wave, the city of Anqing logged one blacklisting in excruciating detail, as our research found. At a checkpoint, “the culprit” refused to follow the advice of Chinese Communist Party members on duty, used a pair of pliers to cut through a fence that blocked the road and threw it off to the side. This led “the [Chinese Communist] Party flagpole on the fence to be bent across the road” and “the offender then [driving] over the flagpole, causing the party flagpole to be damaged. The damaged items were worth RMB 20.”

And there are many other examples. Putian, China, uses the SCS to publicize and reward famous brands (without any clear relation to their “creditworthiness”) and publishes a unique social credit “whitelist.” Ningbo’s environmental bureau blacklists companies that “have received criticism in the media and failed to correct their actions.” Wuhan officials said the city has issued SCS rewards to 240,000 citizens. Rongcheng takes the prize for the most brow-furrowing experiment: Volunteers snoop on neighbors, who lose points for failing to clear snow from their porches, quarreling with neighbors, and so on. (The central government has since said scoring should not be used to punish citizens.)

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https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/ch ... oritarian/

The myths of comic-book dystopian nightmares in China are collapsing, as was obvious to anyone who had spent an ounce of time in China or knew anything about the country beyond exagerated headlines designed to promote clicks or advance state interests.