The worst dystopia in the world - China

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

It is difficult to find a country more romanticized by the flight of folk fantasy than China. Some see the gigantic state as the leader of the 21st century, while others see the Chinese as the future invaders of Siberia. Still others like to compare the success and capitalization of Chinese companies with those of Western competitors.

Admirers of the political system stand out as a separate group - it seems to them that the Celestial Empire is “the USSR that we have lost”.

There are enough misconceptions - and the lack of adequate informational feedback only fuels freedom of thought. China and its tax residents are constantly flickering in economic reports and articles about the next sale, in which local marketplaces collected a billion dollar in three minutes.

But it is worth taking a closer look and it becomes clear that it is more logical to call China Mordor than an economic miracle.

The score that decides your life

Imagine that Amazon has expanded to an incredible size - the company has taken over the remnants of offline retail, absorbed banks, bought Google with its services. The giant knows everything about you, from movie preferences to credit history and average grocery check.

Comparing the data, a universal algorithm assigns a grade to the profile: from one to 1000. This score determines the position in society - a high indicator simplifies employment, obtaining loans and gives priority conditions for medical care. It sounds like a retelling of one of the episodes of "Black Mirror", but echoes the Chinese realities. Don't believe me? Ok, read on.

So, the total turnover of mobile payments in China in 2017 amounted to about $ 5.5 trillion. For comparison, in the United States, smartphones paid only $ 112 billion.

China is dominated by two payment services (although such a modest definition does not suit them). These are Alipay and WeChat messenger. It is impossible to call them applications - they have grown into full-fledged ecosystems. For example, the functionality of Alipay allows any Chinese citizen to safely leave the house without a wallet - from a smartphone, both utility bills and car maintenance or buying vegetables in the local market are equally successful.

Here, WIRED magazine described the everyday life of a Chinese guy Lazarus Liu - he entrusted his passport, license, license plate, absolutely all personal expenses to the subsidiary service of Alibaba corporation. And one day I found a new icon on the Alipay home screen.

Among the applications appeared a certain Zhima Credit - an individual lending service that constantly evaluates the user's solvency. This is not your usual credit rating: Zhima is collecting data more actively and digging deeper. The final grade, which varies from 350 to 950, is influenced not only by timely replenishment, but also by the nature of purchases, grades from educational institutions, and the rating of friends. This is all called social security and is aimed at limiting "Bad people" in favor of financial freedom "good people".

Writer Mara Hvistendal has lived in China for over 5 years, but left the country in 2014, before the popularity of mobile payments became widespread. Back this summer, she signed up with AliPay and Zhima Credit.

Since she had no previous transactions, the girl was assigned a 550 rating. She ended up in a financial ghetto: she could not rent a bike without a $ 30 deposit. The same situation was repeated when ordering a room at a hotel and at a video equipment rental point. A higher rating would provide much more convenience: at one time, users with more than 750 points might even miss the security check at Beijing airport.

Benefits for highly rated users are only one side of personalized lending. You can ditch your status in any way: from non-payment of a fine for speeding to peeping at a state exam or excessive addiction to video games.

It is also undesirable to be friends with "weak" users. All this social and financial madness should become part of a unified state credit system by 2020 - the state cooperates with several companies at once to ensure the most reliable and rich data flow.

However, it cannot do without interaction even now. For example, here is the story of journalist Liu Hu - he was fined $ 1,350 for writing "false" text.

He quickly filed a fine and sent a photo of the check to the court. However, he ended up on the "black list" and now he cannot even order plane tickets. After sending a request to the court, Liu learned that the payment was not accepted due to an error in the account number. After making sure that the data was correct, Hu paid the fine again. This time there was no answer - now Liu is literally a second-class citizen.

Is such concern of the state about the financial security of its residents good?

Learn in seven minutes

It took Chinese law enforcement only 7 minutes to find and detain a BBC reporter. The experimenter independently uploaded his photograph to the database, through which the branched surveillance system is looking for people, and went out into the street. Cameras, facial recognition algorithms and operatives worked in perfect tandem.

A total of 170 million cameras are reported to be installed in major Chinese cities. However, by 2020 it is planned to install another 400 million additional "eyes". Naturally, they do not operate separately from other citizen surveillance systems.

It’s funny - Beijing-based political activist Hu Jia, for example, once bought a slingshot through WeChat. As he says, without malice - just a friend advised a tube gadget to relieve stress.

However, soon a local "comrade major" appeared on Jia's doorstep and asked if he was going to attack nearby surveillance cameras. There is no need to talk about data privacy in such a situation. Alibaba, for example, has a team called Shendong, which means Magic Shield. Its employees monitor the operation of marketplaces and mark potentially dangerous transactions.

In addition, most Chinese companies have police stations on their campuses - if employees who monitor suspicious transactions or accounts find a hint of illegal activity, they can quickly relay information to security forces.

Moreover, this is not just an option to choose from, but an urgent recommendation. Beloved by many business quotation books, Jack Ma, for example, expresses his loyalty to the party line without stuttering. Here is a quote from him: "The political and legal systems of the future are inseparable from the Internet, inseparable from big data."

Everything is moving towards a predictive justice system, when criminals can be packed in advance - so that they do not even have time to take to the streets. Of course, it will not do without the final death of political activism.

Miracle on the bones of freedom

Do not forget that the leading Chinese companies have become so successful due to the extreme closedness of the domestic market with an impressive capacity.

Local counterparts Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube do not need to worry about competing with international services, because they simply do not work in the country. The same is true for online retail, where Alibaba rules. The New York Times also cannot expand the subscriber base in the Middle Kingdom - the newspaper was blocked after 2012 investigations of the wealthy elite of the local government.

It will not work to enumerate the entire list of blocked resources, and a simple access restriction is not enough. Closing accounts or spying on public chats is an equally popular scenario in China.

Considering all this disturbing news, it is extremely difficult to sympathize with China. A country steeped in spying on its own citizens is even worse than arrogant private companies that hunt for user data.

Considering the scale of Chinese government projects and the stability of the political course, assigning China the status of the largest dystopia is the normal course.

Where else can you find such Napoleonic plans and such a willingness to implement them? And not on the chamber scale of an insane dictatorship, but at the junction of authoritarianism and relative freedom.