The Chinese Social Credit System: “From dystopia to reality”
Since the digital age has paced with its shining outcomes in past decades, the contemporary lifestyles in the urban have continued and continue to evolve and accommodate with the brand new technologic approaches to regulate the society; using it to track ‘the out of order people’ or specifically for all the society like social-credit system within China. Even the tracking system for the citizens which is finalized with punishment and reward seems fair and reasonable at once, as Postman (1998) said this technologic usage can be a part of a kind of self-annihilation in terms of the greater good while the opposite has been desired. He claims that “technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us”. In the light of the nature of humanity and technologic changes, like a knife that might be turned into a murder weapon while its origin is just a basic for cutting food within another hands, could become a part of building the under-controlled, pessimistic dystopia of the human future.
Chinese social credit system is basically based on the leveling the citizens by their digital traces and their preferences such as the what they searched on the internet search engine, what they bought from the online shopping; also their physical traces which are captured by the surveillance cameras around the cities for following the behavior of the people, whether crossing the street or not while the light is red, the individual pollutes the environment or not and so on. For sure, while the positive attitude and behaviors in the cooperative urban life will be awarded, the direct opposite will be punished by subtracting some points from this person’s social credits. When you do not keep your street clean or search for a historic rebellion attempt against the state on the internet that wanted to hide, it will affect your next summer holiday plans. In fact, it’s an excellent idea to check if people are following the rules which are the main source of the social order, rewarding citizens who respect the law and each other. However, the way of determining the credits might be problematic in terms of privacy. This privacy problem has two sharp sides that both may cut; one of them is tracing the private lives of the country dwellers and collecting the all personal life pieces can make the people paranoiac and feel them live under the ‘Big Brother is watching’ as inside Orwell’s dystopia 1984. Moreover, the other problem is the security of this big data. Mozur and Krolik (2019) have pointed to the same threat against the protection of this big data within the information which have been revealed by the New York Times; the authorities gathered the personal data of millions of people on under governmental control servers which are unprotected by even basic security measures. It also found that another type of private users, third parties also have wide access to these personal data collected by the Chinese government. It, actually, indicates that the advance has come at the expense of personal privacy, nonetheless, it has become a trade-off between the privacy and possibility and flexibility to control. Despite the fact that this risk has come with the system’s own objectors, apart from them, also the supporters, or at least the observers who approach the Chinese social credit system neutrally, even they accept the loss of privacy but with calling it ‘small withdrawals’. Minter (2019) expresses the tracking process by the government does not bother most of the Chinese people in many different aspects, he alongside perpetual surveillance and the loss of privacy is a small price to pay. His approach postulated that the erosion of privacy has been already begun; the society is acting with the unofficial grades by the users, not the government on digital life, the tendency of the people is being constituted by the information which has been already entered on the social media. Therefore, the advancements for the quality of the life are worth this erosion, especially in an autocracy such as China where the low-level privacy spread across the country. Unfortunately, it seems illogical because of the fact that no one wants to plug out an intensive care unit while even a vegetative state person linked to it.
The Social Credit System in China theoretically has originated in order to curtail the untrustworthy and establish again and spread the trustworthy to all over the land. Fundamentally, it seems that the system with enforcement to be a good citizen. It also can be beneficial in the aspect of the big city dwellers who are under the rain of data and for them, these credits can help to reduce the duration of decision. However, it must be remembered that these enforcements finally controlled and determined by the government and it can evolve into the sword of Damocles for the people who are against the government, peculiarly for an autocrat and totalitarian regimes. In China, as Dia (2020) argues and defends that the people always overact against the governmental enforcements and exaggerate the government overreach through the system, but several cases have occurred in the country so far had shown directly opposite sides which depicts a dark nightmare for the specific societies. As Greenfield (2018) has mentioned, Li Xiolin, is a lawyer and human rights activist has been encountered with a penalty just before a simple domestic flight. According to Greenfield. ‘his name had been entered into a national no-fly list because he would run afoul of the whims of a petty bureaucrat’. If the central executive unit gets all small pieces of an individual’s life traces, arbitrarily controlling the small pieces of an individual’s life is being occurred inevitably, and more terrifying, legitimately.
In conclusion, intuitions and logic say that there is a high possibility to give more example for supporting the dark side of the system whose source code is human ambitions. While the desires of a citizen cannot affect relatively harmful on; the bureaucratic one might be fatal, it can demolish the life of a person radically. When the previous sanctions of the Chinese government for instance in Urumqi, Xinjiang against the Uygur minority have been thought, the prejudices about the controlling, more officially social crediting system outcomes in the pessimistic perspective become more realistic estimation.
References
1) Postman, N., (1998). Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change Talk delivered in Denver Colorado. Retrieved from https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf
2) Mozur, P. & Krolik, A., (2019), A Surveillance Net Blankets China’s Cities, Giving Police Vast Powers. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/technology/china-surveillance.html
3) Minter A., (2019). Why Big Brother Doesn’t Bother Most Chinese. Retrieved from https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/why-big-brother-doesn-t-bother-most-chinese-1.1203728
4) Dai, X. (2020). Enforcing Law and Norms for Good Citizens: One View of China’s Social Credit System Project. Development. doi:10.1057/s41301–020–00244–2
5) Greenfield, A., (2018). China’s Dystopian Tech Could Be Contagious. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/chinas-dangerous-dream-of-urban-control/553097/
