China’s social credit system set to kick off in Beijing in 2020

The Chinese state wants to control its citizens via a system of social scoring that punishes behaviour it doesn’t approve of.

This initiative has been widely reported, including an excellent piece from ABC Australia, but this marks one of the first times a specific timescale has been attributed to it. Bloomberg reports that Beijing, China’s capital city, plans to implement the social credit system by the end of 2020, which will affect 22 million citizens.

The full plan has been published on a Chinese government website, and we currently have our Beijing bureau sifting through it to bring you our own take on the primary material. But for the time being we’re relying on Bloomberg’s account, which highlights just how sinister this sort of thing is.

People who accumulate higher social ‘scores’, the rules and algorithms for which are presumably opaque, subjective and nebulous, get access to special privileges, while those who fall foul of the system will apparently be unable to move even a single step. This is hopefully at least a bit hyperbolic, but it does indicate that a lot of the sanctions attached to a low score focus on the ability to travel.

Mobile technologies, including smartphones, social media, facial recognition, etc, will clearly play a big part in this Orwellian social manipulation strategy. The fact that our every action, or even inaction, now leaves a permanent digital fingerprint makes this sort of thing possible in a way that it never has been before. If you want a further sense of quite how seamlessly it could metastasize beyond China, watch the episode of Black Mirror called Nosedive, a preview of which you can see below.