askchapo

The number isn’t real. China does not have a single nationwide “social credit score” that rates every citizen.

What actually exists is a set of legal blacklists, the most famous being the court judgment defaulter list (失信被执行人). It applies to people who refuse to comply with a court decision, usually things like unpaid debts.

If you ignore a court order, the court can place you under a high-consumption restriction (限制高消费). That means you can’t spend money on certain luxury services (first-class train tickets, flights, five-star hotels, or other high-end purchases) until you comply with the judgment.

You can still travel normally, stay in regular hotels, work, shop, and live your life. The restriction is specifically designed to stop people who refuse to obey court rulings from enjoying luxury spending while ignoring their legal obligations.

The popular idea in the west that everyone in China has a constantly changing personal “score” based on everyday behavior is simply western fantasy.

Here's the actual law. It's just a system of restrictions for people doing business crimes and such. People don't get banned from riding trains or getting good schooling opportunities for having low "credit scores" (something that is never mentioned in the actual law), but from refusing to do something a court has ordered them to do.

Being restricted from leaving the country is another one people bring up a lot, and it's untranslated on that site, but according to Google Translate, it's also for judgement defaulters, people who haven't paid their taxes, and military deserters.

Now that you have some serious answers, time for some memes:

-100 FICO credit score

There was a fad amongst regional governments in China to aggregate different databases of public records into one big one that was open to the public to search. Public records could range from court rulings to business licenses.

The sort of people who have the most public records tend to be business owners and these efforts resulted in a sort of panopticon on the Chinese bourgeoisie. Now a local citizen could look up who owns a restaurant, what other business they own, how many health code violations each of those business had, and if the owner ever beat his wife, all in one database.

These were referred to as social credit systems but no "score" was ever associated with them. Some wonkier Chinese technocrats did propose plans to assign numbers and consequences to those numbers but AFAIK they were never implemented. The phrase "social credit score" did work its way into the jargon of the Chinese youth but it came from the US joke meme.

still digging up the source for all this but it was from a podcast that was interviewing the maintainer of 'China Law', a crowd source effort to translate Chinese law into English.

Complete and total myth

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/16/chinas-orwellian-social-credit-score-isnt-real/

https://archive.is/q4e2C

The only system that exists is essentially like credit score, it's to do with debt. It is true that having travel restrictions applied (no flying, no trains) to prevent people in debt from leaving the country is a feature.

Some private companies tested a social credit thing in limited areas. They're not China though they're companies and those tests went nowhere.

If you have a good credit score you can rent those little portable charging devices that are everywhere without paying the 100 rmb deposit.

But yeah it's not really a thing even western media has been forced to admit that by this point

Rather than having a bunch of cops on patrol watching for people breaking the road rules and pulling those people over and fining them; in China there are mostly just lots of cameras. If you're caught breaking the law on camera too many times then they'll come to find you and take your licence away.

From there the thought process is, this is more insidious because of spooky cameras. And people do a thought experiment from there about "what other behaviour are they monitoring / what other penalties could possibly be imposed?" and pretend what they imagined is reality, evidenced by a kernel of truth. That authorities enforce road rules via camera surveillance in many countries isn't considered because, y'know, sinophobia.