"Dystopian" Social Credit System Slowly Unveiled in China

Beginning this May, China will begin to gradually usher in a new system designed to maintain social order without raising attention to the far-reaching consequences it may eventually cause.

Years in the making, China's massive new social credit system will ultimately assign a fluctuating credit score to each and every Chinese citizen with the purpose of rewarding high scorers and punishing low scorers. Whereas a criminal system has courts hand out punishments after a trial, China's social credit system will punish whoever has a score that falls below a specific value.

Although the new rule has been described as "dystopian science fiction" for empowering bureaucracy as the arbiter of fate, Chinese media are introducing the latest social credit measures as being apt punishments.

As NetEase reports, passengers who threaten the safety of train operations will be restricted from buying train tickets again. Headlines specify smokers and ticket forgers as potential inclusions on the blacklist, but the key example was a story from earlier this year that gripped the public's attention.

Back in January, a woman was caught on camera (see video below) jostling with a train conductor, insisting on delaying an entire train full of passengers waiting to depart the platform from Hefei. For a punctual society well accustomed to trains departing before their scheduled times, the incident drew a wide backlash against the woman for putting her personal needs above the greater good.

https://v.qq.com/txp/iframe/player.html?vid=g0532e9gug8&width=500&height=375&auto=0

Having painted such a target in mind, the new rules will ban blacklisted passengers from buying plane or upper-class train tickets for a year. And, because using a nation-wide database of credit scores to punish train delayers seems like overkill, the new rules also restrict train and plane ticket purchases from people who have committed "serious acts of dishonesty" in crimes such as tax evasion and fraud.

As proposed by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) at the Two Sessions parliamentary meeting, the new rollout of social credit measures has broader implications that include restrictions on real estate purchases. And, as Western news reports, a poor social credit score will punish people even further with restrictions that extend to high-speed Internet and restaurants, something made all the more alarming by reports that bad scores can be the result of small infractions like leaving a bicycle in a footpath or giving apologies deemed "insincere" by authorities.

But where May will formally bring these newest measures forward, a travel blacklist has already been in the works. As the Sydney Morning Herald reports, nine million people have already been prevented from buying plane tickets in China while another three million are barred from buying business class train tickets.

Although the formula for determining a social credit score remains secret, China has recently seen the massive rise in cashless wallet systems like Alipay and TenPay. The cashless systems have become so popular that it is favored over cash in some places, while the Chinese government has taken to promoting it as one of China's "four new modern inventions."

Images: Sina News (sina.com.cn), Weibo.com, Gurit.cn

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