In Conversation with Vincent Brussee
13 November 2023
9DASHLINE recently had the pleasure of speaking with Vincent Brussee about his new book Social Credit: The Warring States of China’s Emerging Data Empire.
Drawing on a rich body of empirical evidence, the book offers one of the first comprehensive assessments of the People’s Republic of China’s infamous ‘Social Credit System’ — from its fragmented implementation to its implications for both human rights and the market order. Separating fact from fiction, the book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in technology, governance, and surveillance in China and beyond.
It seems that China has become the country we all love to hate. However, you suggest that a lot of what we outsiders know about China is rife with misinformation. In this regard, you characterise the Social Credit System (SCS) as “maybe one of the most widely misunderstood phenomena of the 21st century”. Could you briefly explain what the SCS is, and why China is so misunderstood today?
VB: Even China’s government would not be able to tell you what the SCS is or is supposed to become. If you were to ask one hundred government officials these questions, half of them would not know and the other half would each tell you something completely different. This makes the system deeply messy and easy to misunderstand.
What most elements commonly lumped together under ‘social credit’ share is the goal to help enforce legal obligations — e.g., loan repayments, judicial verdicts, and regulations — in China’s market economy. Authorities do so by establishing basic data-sharing mechanisms across government units and punitive mechanisms (the infamous ‘blacklists’). Yet, this involves no elaborate scoring, and there is no mass evaluation of individual behaviour. Nor is it actually a ‘system’. It is more like a fragmented collection of databases as well as carrots and sticks that authorities can use as they see fit.
As I critique these misunderstandings, China is certainly not misunderstood in all domains. This is a narrative the Chinese Communist Party likes to propagate to essentially gaslight critics of its policies. We know very well how repressive surveillance can be in China. But not everything in China is about policing dissent. You cannot run a country of 1.4 billion people through repression alone — at least if you want the country to be more than merely a more populous version of North Korea.
This is essentially where the SCS narratives went wrong. A few analysts speculatively interpreted a tremendously broad and vague policy document from this limited perspective and conflated it with fringe and quirky experiments. This led to a snowball of ‘Chinese Whispers’, the game where a message is whispered from one person to another until the message becomes unrecognisably garbled along the way. Because it confirmed our biases of surveillance in China, no one stopped to question it — even otherwise renowned China experts. It undoubtedly did not help that no one in China really understood what was happening either.
You write that there is good reason to believe the Chinese leadership would not even be interested in a social credit score. How can we say this with such certainty?
VB: A score that aims to capture everything a person ever does into a single metric simply would not work. Imagine owning a restaurant subject to a simple score, measuring how well you pay your taxes and the hygiene in your restaurant. If you always pay your taxes perfectly but the kitchen’s hygiene is appalling, you might expect a middling aggregate — say, 500 out of 1,000 points. Such a score would tell neither the tax authorities nor the food inspector anything useful because neither factor is middling as the score suggests. In other words, by combining too many unrelated factors into one metric, you turn big data into dumb data.
This is not to imply that quantification of behaviour does not exist in China. Its police would certainly be interested in predictive algorithms to assess whether someone would start a protest. Some cities have started giving points for ‘civilised behaviour’ like donating blood that can be exchanged for small perks. And in every Chinese restaurant, you will find a letter-based grade that expresses its hygiene standards. The lesson, however, is that it is pointless to merge all of these together into one mega system.
Moreover, the risk of backlash might outweigh the gains in control a similar system might bring. During the pandemic, the ‘white-paper protests’ showed how arbitrary use of state power (i.e., large-scale forced quarantines) could yield more resistance, not less. Authorities already have a wide range of covert tools at their disposal to deal with acute threats to the state. So why would they bring the full suite of repressive tools down on everyone through a ‘social credit score’ when most of these people do not even pose a threat to the state? A ‘social credit score’ would suddenly make surveillance omnipresent in people’s lives, which in many cases only increases resistance rather than suppressing it.
Has the COVID-19 pandemic and its domestic management by the Chinese government further slowed down or revitalised the implementation of the SCS?
VB: The COVID-19 pandemic was something of a reset for the SCS. Around the turn of the decade, it became clear that many officials had abused the system. That is to say, they saw the SCS as a ‘super police’ that could address any problem they faced. Jaywalking, quarrelling with neighbours, or eating on the subway? “Just call it ‘untrustworthy conduct’ and add the culprits to a blacklist,” they seemed to think. Many officials seemed unconcerned with the proportionality and legality of these punishments, let alone their relationship with the concept of ‘credit’ more fundamentally. This is also how many myths emerged. Observers looked at these quirky local initiatives, sometimes mere ideas, and presented them as national policy.
These issues were brought to the limelight during the pandemic. Some cities threatened citizens who did not wear masks properly or failed to get tested with blacklisting. Other citizens were at risk of punishment because they could not repay their loans due to lockdowns. Everyone — including China’s government — suddenly seemed to realise something had to change, as the development was starting to threaten the legitimacy and efficacy of the system.
Therefore, authorities released a myriad of new policies during the pandemic to restrict the scope of ‘social credit’ — making sure officials could not punish citizens for anything but severe (and, in many cases, intentional) transgressions of legal obligations. These required dozens, if not hundreds, of local SCS initiatives to be amended or abolished altogether. This development cannot solely be attributed to the pandemic — similar concerns had existed before — but the pandemic certainly accelerated the official response.
You caution that there is a risk of framing practices in China as completely alien, even if they have deep roots in global practices. What do you mean by this, and what can we do to prevent this?
VB: Mainstream discussions of social credit seem to imply that something like that could never happen ‘here in the West’, positing China as some ‘exotic’ dystopia. Yet, we do not need to buy into conspiracies of a supposed World Economic Forum-sponsored “global social credit score” or engage in whataboutisms to whitewash surveillance in China to acknowledge the parallels between the SCS and Western practices.
Blacklists as we know them today are an American invention, and so are credit scores. One of the SCS’s founding figures was inspired by the screening of credit scores in the United States, lauding how “people with poor credit cannot get a job anymore”. The SCS has taken these ideas and expanded them massively, making them much more problematic, but the principles remain analogous.
Most of the issues we have seen in the context of the SCS are due to legal norms surrounding the use of blacklists remaining in their infancy — not because of some big bad AI. This allowed officials to abuse it, penalising citizens over negligible transgressions. Such challenges should not sound alien to us at all, as witnessed in the recent case of a Dutch tax fraud blacklist that wrongfully targeted tens of thousands of citizens.
In hyping up exotified threats like a ‘social credit score’, I am afraid that we might miss more immediate issues about government surveillance that do not involve scary scores or AI. We certainly need good regulation on AI. Still, I believe the solution should begin with safeguards that apply irrespective of the technological nature. Buzzwords will come and go, while transparency and accountability in complex systems are required everywhere.
You explain that the Chinese government is currently in the process of setting up a system called the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) credit risk classification — a top-down data-driven mechanism assessing the compliance risk a company poses to China’s market economy. What is the significance of this mechanism and what future implications does it hold for businesses in China?
VB: This new SCS initiative could significantly amplify compliance headaches for companies. It aims to quantify both the risk that a company breaks a law or regulation and the potential harm to society because of such a violation. In other words, a company producing food and medicine would be classified as higher risk than one producing classical music. A company with a spotless compliance record would be lower risk than one run by a 19-year-old with countless violations behind their name. For this, the SAMR not only aims to use ‘hard’ indicators such as past compliance records. It is also exploring how social media discussions of your company or the age of your CEO might be used as data.
Although it will not lead to automatic punishments, the consequences of a poor classification could still be serious. Every company in China, including foreign ones, will be subject to it. Poor classifications will lead to intensified inspections. Everything you aim to do as a company could be put under a microscope. At that point, things inspectors might have previously ignored could suddenly become subject to serious scrutiny. I suspect this is where the SCS is headed going forward, although things currently remain in the pilot stage.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Vincent Brussee is a PhD Candidate at Leiden University. In addition to writing extensively on the Social Credit System, his current research focuses on the application of data science to Chinese policy analysis. Previously, he was an Analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS).