RfCF Student Opinion: What is wrong with China's social credit system?
‘Big Brother is watching’. Never would we have imagined that the predictions of a dystopian novel would haunt us today – George Orwell’s “1984” is not only a critique of an oppressive government but a harbinger of the current state of affairs. In China, simple acts of boarding a bus, purchasing a coffee, or even walking on the streets are not only monitored but rated. Welcome to China’s Social Credit System, where a series of big data and artificial intelligence processes grant people living credit scores based on their social, political, and economic behavior. The social credit system gives out benefits and rewards to those who score well and imposes sanctions upon those who scored poorly. Herein lies the question: what is the yardstick in determining ‘good’ social behavior?
If China is bent on implementing its social credit system (as it announced that it will take effect in 2020), it needs to consider practical issues such as the rules and regulations to be put in place. With personal information stored as big data, the privacy of its people needs to be protected, if not from state officials but also from being stolen or lost. On 1 June 2017, China’s cybersecurity law came into effect, becoming the first national-level law to address cybersecurity and data privacy protection. However, with more directives and drafts forthcoming, there remains uncertainty regarding the application and effectiveness of this legislation in regulating society. In 2018, the Chinese government drafted the Personal Information Security Specification which took effect in the same year in May. It references the European Union’s law on data protection – Guide to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, this specification is not legally binding: China needs to step up its regulatory and protective measures if it wants its social credit system to materialize.
Yet, is this Orwellian tool of mass surveillance justified? Arguably not: the Chinese government declares that it is a way of boosting administrative efficiency and encouraging trust and moral behavior by its citizens. This is in lieu of Xi Jin Ping’s current measures to heavily sanction corrupt state officials, blacklisting certain government members. The Social Credit System will extend to the corporate sphere. Negative scores or non-compliance records could lead to companies being blacklisted and subjected to sanctions, such as higher tax rates or restrictions on access to financial services and capital markets.
The broad arms of the social credit system extend its reach to almost every aspect of people’s lives. It would only encourage people to hide behind a veil of artificiality. To gain higher points, individual actions would be specifically engineered to fit socially invented ‘rules’. Where does authenticity lie in such a surveillance society? Will the traditional functions of law to punish, rehabilitate, deter, and maintain order still be relevant in such a picture-perfect society?
Over the past two years, more than 200 journalists who have expressed dissent with the government have been detained. If “good” social behavior means that freedom of speech must be restricted, then must people put up a façade to earn credit points? This seems rather absurd. The strong political influence over China’s legal system does not help. The concept of ‘rule of law’ is tainted by the Communist Party – on the one hand, it announces a new direction to uphold equality of law but on the other hand, the Communist Party insists that its authority supersedes the law. China strongly opposes the Universal Declaration on Human Rights 1948. Furthermore, the European Court of Human Rights has no jurisdiction to hear human rights cases from China, as it is not a member state. Thus, with a legal system that lacks protections for civil rights, people cannot assert their own rights, much less call for a judicial review.
The prospect of living in a world where the distinction between private and public life becomes almost non-existent is extremely frightening: until China is ready to answer the questions raised above, it should not be prepared to transform an intelligent society into an artificially intelligent one.
(Also published on Dicta magazine)
