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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 22 2019, @01:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the Happiness-is-mandatory.-The-social-credit-system-is-your-friend dept.

China's courts have now added 13.5 million individuals to the social-credit punishment list.

People deemed untrustworthy in China have been blocked from the purchase of more than 25 million plane and train tickets, as the country works to build the massive social-credit system designed to monitor and shape the conduct of its citizens

The system covers "19 key areas of dishonesty" such as failing to make court-ordered payments (China has no personal bankruptcy statutes), spending habits, turnstile violations, and filial piety, as well as

spreading online rumours and false information, committing financial fraud, delivering unlicensed medical treatment, evading taxes, cheating on tests and fixing sports matches.

Chinese officials are careful to point out that this is only the beginning of the process of implementing a social-credit system. There are also multiple blacklists involved, not one big blacklist like the United State's 'No-Fly' list.

In total, the number of blacklists in China now likely numbers in the hundreds, said Dai Xin, a professor at Ocean University of China School of Law. But it remains experimental, he said, like many initiatives in China, where "governments just go ahead with some vague assumptions of what may happen if a measure is adopted."

Critics call the system the beginning of a "digital panopticon", while other Chinese scholars and officials defend the system as one that will ease life for those who display good conduct and integrity even as it deprives the untrustworthy of access to services.


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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Monday April 22 2019, @04:13PM (1 child)

    by Bot (3902) on Monday April 22 2019, @04:13PM (#833432) Journal

    But you can do that with money and needs.
    They are creating an army of hopeless.
    The only sensible strategy I can predict from this situation is to wait until tensions become acute and then send the hopeless to colonize africa. They already built the cities and kept them empty.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Monday April 22 2019, @04:56PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Monday April 22 2019, @04:56PM (#833449)

    >They are creating an army of hopeless.

    Are they though? I'm not at all clear on the details, but China's population as a whole is seeing a level of upwards mobility that the US can only dream of, and these social credit policies seem to (mostly) be interfering in people's recreational and investment opportunities, rather than their ability to get ahead through hard work and social connections.

    Assuming there's ways to be "actively prosocial" to increase your social credit score as well, even those deprivations can act as a potent carrot-and-stick motivator to get the populace to fall in line.