Photo by Avery Evans on Unsplash
Your credit score is social credit. Your LinkedIn endorsements are social credit. Your Uber passenger rating, Instagram engagement metrics, Amazon reviews, and Airbnb host status are all social credit systems that track you, score you, and reward you based on your behavior.
Social credit, in its original economic definition, means distributing industry profits to consumers to increase purchasing power. But the term has evolved far beyond economics. Today, it describes any kind of metric that tracks individual behavior, assigns scores based on that behavior, and uses those scores to determine access to services, opportunities, or social standing.
Sounds dystopian, doesn’t it? But guess what? Every time an algorithm evaluates your trustworthiness, reliability, or social value, whether for a loan, a job, a date, or a ride, you're participating in a social credit system. The scoring happens constantly, invisibly, and across dozens of platforms that weave into your daily life.
The only difference between your phone and China's social credit system is that China tells you what they're doing. We pretend our algorithmic reputation scores are just “user experience features.” At least Beijing admits they're gamifying human behavior.
When Americans think of the "Chinese social credit system," they likely picture Black Mirror episodes and Orwellian nightmares. Citizens are tracked for every jaywalking incident, points are deducted for buying too much alcohol, and facial recognition cameras are monitoring social gatherings; the image is so powerful that Utah's House passed a law banning social credit systems, despite none existing in America.
Here's what's actually happening. As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.
What actually gets tracked? Primarily court judgment defaults: people who refuse to pay fines or loans despite having the ability. The Supreme People's Court's blacklist is composed of citizens and companies that refuse to comply with court orders, typically to pay fines or repay loans. Some experimental programs in specific cities track broader social behavior, but these remain isolated experiments.
The gap between Western perception and Chinese reality is enormous, and it reveals something important: we're worried about a system that barely exists while ignoring the behavioral scoring systems we actually live with.
You already live in social credit.
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