Digital dictatorship in China or the all-seeing eye of the 21st century

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

Becoming the head of China, Xi Jinping began with a tough fight against corrupt officials in the ranks of party members, and now intends to take on the whole of society. Using digital technologies and big data, the system will analyze data about each citizen, assigning him an individual rating. Benefits and incentives await law-abiding owners of a high rating, difficulties and ostracism for a low rating.

For modern China, the image of a large copying machine is firmly entrenched, which is only capable of modifying and replicating other people's achievements. But now it seems that the time has come for the Chinese to give the world their own invention, comparable in scale to the paper, gunpowder and compass they once created. China invents digital dictatorship.

Who is the ideological inspirer?

Imagine a world where there is a higher intelligence, an all-seeing eye that knows more about you than yourself. Each of your actions is evaluated, even minor sins do not go unnoticed and are written down to you in the negative. And good deeds improve your karma. Humanity has long thought about this: the common place of any religion was the existence of the postulate that you can deceive or be deceived, but the sky sees everything, and you will definitely be rewarded what you deserve. For many thousands of years such a picture of the world existed only at the level of faith. But now, with the advent of new technologies, it is becoming a reality. The all-seeing eye of the 21st century has come to China. And his name is the social credit system.

A more accurate translation of this term is the system of social trust. They thought about creating such a system even under the former President of the People's Republic of China, Hu Jintao, who ruled the country from 2002 to 2012. In 2007, "Some Remarks of the Office of the State Council of the PRC on the Establishment of a Social Credit System" were published.

Then the project was very similar to the extended scoring system - an assessment of the borrower's solvency, which is produced by the FICO company in the United States. “Using international experience, improve scoring systems in the field of lending, taxation, contract performance, product quality” - this was the task set in the document.

After Xi Jinping came to power, the State Council of the People's Republic of China in 2014 published a new document - "The Program for the Creation of a Social Credit System (2014-2020)". In it, the system has changed beyond recognition.

It follows from the program that by 2020, not only every company, but every resident of mainland China will be tracked and evaluated by this system in real time. The trust rating of individuals will be linked to the internal passport. The ratings will be published in a centralized database on the Internet for free access.

Winners of a high rating will enjoy various social and economic benefits. And those with a bad rating will have to suffer - they will be hit by the full power of administrative sanctions and restrictions. The main task, and this is clearly stated in the "Program of the State Council", so that "those who have justified trust can enjoy all the benefits, and those who have lost trust cannot take a single step."

In mid-December 2016, Xi Jinping said at a meeting of the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee: “To combat the acute problem of lack of trust, we need to firmly tackle the creation of a reliability assessment system that covers the whole of society. It is necessary to improve both the mechanisms for encouraging law-abiding and conscientious citizens, and the mechanisms for punishing those who break the law and have lost trust, so that a person simply does not dare, simply cannot lose trust."

Of course, it is not known for certain who exactly in the top leadership of the PRC belongs to the idea of creating such a system. But given the fact that the system has changed after a new generation of leaders came to power, as well as the attention that the current chairman of the PRC pays to the fight against corruption, it can be assumed that the ideological inspirer of the all-seeing system of social credit is Xi Jinping himself.

Responsible for the creation and implementation of the system, apparently, the State Committee for Development and Reforms of the PRC. At least it is he who publishes various reports on how the work on the creation of the social credit system is progressing. The current work is supervised by the deputy head of the Development and Reform Committee Lian Weilan. He also holds meetings with industry departments and associations, conveys to them the instructions received from the top officials of the country.

Fairytale city

The system is already in pilot mode in about thirty cities in China. Rongcheng City in Shandong Province became the leader in this matter. All residents of the city (670 thousand people) are given a starting rating of 1000 points. Further, depending on their behavior, the rating either rises or falls. Scattered information about the life and activities of a citizen comes from municipal, commercial, law enforcement, judicial authorities to a single information center, where it is processed using big data technology, and the citizen's rating, respectively, either increases or decreases. In Rongcheng, a single information center analyzes, no less, 160 thousand different parameters from 142 institutions. The system of denunciations is also actively encouraged. A citizen who informs where to go about any bad deeds of his neighbor is entitled to at least five points.

The system does not imply any single document, where it would be clearly spelled out what can and cannot be done and what will happen. It is only known that if your rating is more than 1050 points, then you are an exemplary citizen and you are marked with three letters A. With a thousand points you can count on AA. With nine hundred - on B. If the rating fell below 849 - you are already a suspicious carrier of the C rating, you will be kicked out of service in state and municipal structures.

And for those who have 599 points and below, it is not good enough. They are blacklisted with a postscript D, they become outcasts of society, they are not hired for almost any job (you cannot even work in a taxi with a black mark D), they don’t give loans, they don’t sell tickets for high-speed trains and airplanes, they don’t give rent a car and bike without a deposit. Neighbors shy away from you like from fire, because God forbid someone will see how you communicate with person D, they will immediately report you, and your rating will also rapidly go down.

A few more examples of how people with different ratings live in Rongcheng. Those with an AA rating or higher are given a consumer loan of up to 200,000 yuan without collateral and guarantors at a reduced interest rate. Anyone with an A rating can go to the hospital without bail if the cost of treatment does not exceed 10,000 yuan. With AA and AAA ratings, the unsecured amount increases to 20 and 50 thousand yuan, respectively. Practically holy AAA people from the doorstep of a hospital or clinic will be accompanied by junior medical staff free of charge, and provide them with all kinds of assistance. If necessary, they will give a wheelchair without collateral, women will be tested for early detection of cervical cancer and mammography without an appointment. Healthy residents of Rongcheng with an A + rating will be given a bike for rent without a deposit, and the first hour and a half will be free to ride. For comparison, the owners of the C rating will only be given a bike on a 200 yuan bail.

The question arises: how to earn ratings, or at least not to lose them? The Rongcheng authorities say it's very simple. It is enough to live according to the law, repay loans on time, pay taxes, comply with traffic rules (for each violation, in addition to an administrative fine, they also remove from five rating points),not to violate the moral and ethical foundations of society, and everything will be in order. Didn't clean the yard behind my dog - minus five points. I saw an elderly neighbor to the clinic and got five points, explains the Chinese information resource Huanquan.

But the problem is that when it is not clearly stipulated what is possible and what is not, then administrative arbitrariness begins. Nearly innocent people can get hurt. Imagine a situation: a man put non-standard wheels on a car and drove from Rongcheng to warm Guangzhou. The speedometer readings are slightly distorted, and on the way the cameras photographed the number fifteen times for slight speeding. And 75 points is a minus from karma. Upon returning from a trip, a frustrated driver goes to the pharmacy to buy a sedative. It is paid using a mobile application that transmits the purchase data to where it goes. The system evaluates him as mentally unstable and again lowers the rating. As a result, an exemplary patriot and social activist is no longer even suitable for taxi drivers.

How does the system work?

For legal entities, the rules of the game are more clearly formulated. Companies are checked for the compliance of their activities with environmental, legal norms, working conditions and safety, financial reporting are inspected. If there are no complaints, the company is assigned a high rating and it enjoys a preferential tax regime, good lending conditions, administrative procedures are simplified in relation to it on the principle of “accepting an incomplete set”. This means that if, when contacting any authority, the company provided an incomplete set of documents, its appeal will still be accepted for work, and the missing documents can simply be conveyed later or even sent a scan.

Those with a low rating - expensive loans, higher tax rates, a ban on issuing securities, a ban on investing in companies whose shares are traded on the stock exchange, as well as the need to obtain state permission to invest even in those industries that have access to principle is not limited in any way.

But how exactly the system for assessing social trust for individuals will function is still a mystery. What is known at the moment? Data about a person will be collected from all kinds of government agencies, law enforcement and municipal authorities, on the one hand. On the other hand, this is indicated in the program of the State Council, data will be collected by eight private companies.

Then a huge amount of data will go to the All-China Unified Credit Information Platform, which, by the way, is already working. It will process this data array and form ratings. Company ratings can be viewed on the National Public Credit Information System for Companies, and individuals on the Credit China Information Portal.

The first two of the eight private companies collecting information are Alibaba and Tencent. Why these companies were chosen is clear. Tencent is the owner of the WeChat messenger, which is used by 500 million people. Alibaba is the largest e-commerce platform, which is used by 448 million Chinese, and has sales of more than $ 23 billion. Moreover, both Tencent and Alibaba are actively developing the fintech industry: the mobile payment services of these two companies - Alipay and WeChatPay - account for 90% of the market mobile payments in China, the volume of which reached $ 5.5 trillion.

What information can these companies collect? The most valuable one. The mobile application market offers almost limitless opportunities. It is known what you buy, where you buy. By geolocation, you can track where you are, at what time. You can estimate your real income, area of interest, track who and what you chat with and what you read. What posts on social networks do you write, what content do you like. Alibaba, which not only owns Alipay, but also 31% of Weibo, China's largest microblogging service with 340 million users, knows perhaps more about the Chinese than the Ministry of State Security.

By the way, Alibaba has already launched its own rating service Sesame Credit. By what algorithm the ratings are calculated, the company keeps secret. It is only known that the rating is influenced by whether you indicated your real name when registering an account on social networks, what you write, what you read, and even who is your friend. If your friends have people with a low rating, your rating also drops. So it's better not to hang out with unreliable individuals.

Also, according to Li Yingyun, technical director of Sesame Credit, purchases affect the rating. A quote from his interview with Caixin was widely circulated on the Internet, where Li Yingyun stated that “those who play computer games for 10 hours a day will be considered unreliable, and those who regularly buy diapers are probably responsible parents, and their the rating will grow."

This topic has been widely discussed among users of the Chinese microblogging service Weibo, an analogue of Twitter. They even tried to develop their own rating strategy. For example, bloggers claim that if you maintain more than 1,000 yuan on your Alipay account, make small purchases at least once every three to five days, use wealth management services and p2p loans, such as Zhaocaibao, then your rating in Sesame Credit will grow significantly … Thus, there is a version that consumerism can be one of the essential factors of trustworthiness.

Under the hood

The company emphasizes that while Sesame Credit is a pilot project and is purely voluntary. However, firstly, users are actively encouraged to provide personal information and are lured into the rating network, playing on the highest senses. For example, love. Chinese dating service "Baihe", an analogue of Tinder, promises lonely hearts to raise their profiles in search results to the first lines, more often highlight their profiles on the home page if they have a high Sesame rating.

Secondly, many do not even know that the machine is already working against them and they have been under the hood for a long time. Take, for example, various sharing services (short-term rentals) that have bred in huge numbers in China. There are basically two types of sharing around the world: car sharing (car rental) and bike sharing (bike rental). In China, you can rent bicycles, umbrellas, phone chargers, and basketballs.

The business model of such a lease may seem to be extremely ineffective. Renting a bike from the largest bike-sharing service Ofo costs only one and a half yuan per hour, a basketball in Zhulegeqiu can be played for one yuan per hour, and Molisan umbrellas cost the same. Often, all these things are not equipped with any geolocation sensors, anti-theft protection. Unsurprisingly, many firms go broke almost immediately. For example, Wukong Bicycle in Chongqing was forced to close because 90% of the company's bicycles were stolen.

But maybe the problem is completely different? The product to be divided is issued through a special mobile application. Therefore, information about the user is still in the hands of the company. And a dossier is already being collected on dishonest thieves who, it would seem, with impunity got a basketball or an umbrella. And by 2020, when the system is fully operational, the all-seeing eye will ask everyone for old sins.

Who are the judges?

There are still a lot of questions, even purely legal ones, about the social credit system. For example, how legitimate is the use of the client's personal data by companies in favor of a third party, which in this case is the state. Of course, Western tech companies also sometimes use personal data for their own benefit. But then they have to answer before the law.

For example, Google's Russian office was recently fined by a court for reading emails. A resident of Yekaterinburg filed a lawsuit against Google after he believed that the contextual advertising offered to him in the mail service was picked up after reading his email. The court ruled that Google violated the rights of a citizen to privacy and privacy of correspondence. And in China, Alibaba and Tencent are openly talking about cooperation with government agencies and the use of personal data in the compilation of ratings.

The second question is: what rewards and what sanctions are expected for people with high or low ratings? Official documents do not give a clear answer. “The guidelines of the State Council of the People's Republic of China on the establishment and improvement of mechanisms for rewarding persons with a high rating of trust and punishing persons who have lost confidence in order to accelerate the creation of a social credit system” contain rather vague wording.

The holders of high ratings are promised the aforementioned system of "acceptance of an incomplete set", they promise a "green light in all administrative procedures", as well as serious support and preferences in education, employment, starting a business, and social guarantees. Those with a low rating, on the contrary, face all sorts of administrative obstacles, restrictions on the purchase of real estate, air tickets, tickets for high-speed trains, restrictions on travel abroad, restrictions on staying in luxury hotels.

Until clear measures are worked out at the top, each region will have its own rules, and they will be limited only by the imagination of local authorities. Already, Beijing is being severely punished for reselling train tickets; in Jiangsu province - if you do not visit your parents often enough (while nowhere is it written how often you need to visit them); in Shanghai - for hiding a previous marriage or for unreasonable use of a horn in a car; in Shenzhen - for crossing the road in the wrong place.

Finally, the most important question: who is the judge? Who decides what is allowed and what is not? On what basis do private companies calculate ratings? How reliable is the system? What if social media accounts are hacked, data stolen or improperly corrected? Who will be responsible for this? Maybe the Sesame Credit supercomputer is malfunctioning and the rating is miscalculated. But on the basis of these data the destinies of people break down, specific court decisions are made. At the end of 2015, the Supreme Court of the PRC, relying on data from Sesame Credit, imposed the sanctions mentioned in the instructions of the State Council on 5,300 people. By the end of June of this year, there were already 7, 3 million such people.

China Dream Society

According to the Chinese authorities, in the conditions of the rapid growth of the PRC economy, where lending plays an important role, the need for a scoring system is obvious, if only for economic reasons. However, social and political factors are no less important for the authorities. A well-known Chinese political scientist Deng Yuwen wrote about the current situation in the PRC in the following way: “A society in which ethical boundaries are constantly eroding, personal disintegration occurs, there are not even elementary checks - that is virtue, that dishonor, when the whole nation is guided only by interests, such a society degrades to the level of struggle for existence, to the animal level."

According to a number of intellectuals close to the authorities, a society where the honest is considered a loser, where food and other goods are often counterfeited, where there are even false monks collecting donations, where corruption flourishes at all levels, where financial fraud has become the norm - such society is in urgent need of ordering, in the restoration of morality. Otherwise, social stability and, ultimately, the power of the party are under threat.

Xi Jinping understands this very well. He began with a tough fight against corrupt officials in the ranks of party members, and now he intends to take on the whole of society. The goal was announced already in 2012, shortly after Xi's appointment as secretary general - the embodiment of the Chinese dream. And what is the Chinese dream, what exactly should a harmonious society be like? The Chinese leadership is apparently looking for answers to these questions in historical experience.

Around 400 BC. the great Chinese reformer Shang Yang ordered the people to divide into groups of 5-10 families. They were supposed to watch each other and be collectively responsible for the crimes. According to the law, on the doors of houses were supposed to hang tablets with a per capita list of families. The Sotsky headman regularly reported to his superiors about the departure and arrival of each person. This system was called "baojia". The dispute that has been going on for over two thousand years between the followers of Shang Yang, the Legists, who advocated the management of society with the help of a rigid system of rewards and punishments, and the Confucians, who advocated the upbringing of ethical principles in the people with the help of education and the personal example of those in power, became one of the main incentives for the development of management thought in China.

Experimental Rongcheng's authorities decided to apply millennial-proven methods in a new social credit system. Only the entire population of the city is divided into blocks not from 5-10, but from 400 families. But they also have to keep an eye on each other. In addition, dedicated observers are appointed responsible for each unit, who regularly check it, collect photo and video evidence of bad behavior and send this data where it should be.

The political effects of such a social control mechanism in China have long been described. Still living in the II-I centuries BC. the classic of Chinese historiography Sima Qian, a younger contemporary of Polybius, wrote that Baojia, with its mutual responsibility and mutual surveillance, was often used by the authorities to fight opposition and extort taxes from the population.

Of course, the official documents mention that the supreme power should become a locomotive and an example to follow in the new system of social credit. However, specific measures and test projects so far apply only to lower-level party officials. For example, the Sichuan Provincial Party School of China recently signed an agreement with the PRC University of Electronics and Technology to establish the country's first rating and reliability rating system for grassroots officials. The system is called "Smart Red Cloud"

With the help of artificial intelligence technologies and big data, the system will analyze such data about each official as attendance at party meetings, education, marital status. The system will compare the data on the income of the official and his family members with the data on the purchased real estate and luxury goods. Based on these data, as well as information about the official's activity in social networks, the degree of his political reliability will be assessed. It is noted that in this way it will be possible to predict the behavior of an official, assess his moral character and identify potential corrupt officials much more efficiently.

And who will limit the supreme power? The Asan Institute for Policy Studies (Republic of Korea) called the social credit system "George Orwell's nightmare." Time will tell if the social credit system turns into an unprecedented digital dictatorship of the 21st century, an all-seeing Big Brother who watches you vigilantly. It is also unclear if there will be any controls and restrictions on Big Brother himself. In the meantime, Orwell's advice from 1984 seems quite reasonable for the Chinese people: if you want to keep a secret, you must hide it from yourself.