Is social credit just a Chinese phenomenon?

Alongside the accelerating climate crisis, relentless technical innovation is unquestionably the dominant narrative of our era. Anyone who’s reached adulthood during the past quarter century is accustomed to seeing one sphere of human activity after another transfigured by networked digital information technology. Long-settled patterns of production, consumption and expression have been unstitched and rewoven, transforming everything from the way we get around to the way we meet and choose romantic partners. Having reshaped so many other facets of our existence, why would this technology not sooner or later be brought to bear on the ancient human desire to control human behaviour, both individually and at the scale of entire societies? It was inevitable that our time would present us with the spectre of innovation in authoritarian government.

At the leading edge of such innovation is something called ‘social credit’. Now being deployed in China, this is a system in which each individual receives a numeric score expressing the degree to which their behaviour complies with the state’s expectations, and which fluctuates with everything they are seen to do, whether online or off. Cultivate a high score by being neighbourly, modest and, above all, politically quiescent, and you may enjoy the full panoply of privileges that society has to offer. Allow the score to fall beneath a critical threshold, though, and you may find yourself being denied mobility, housing, education, connectivity, even access to ordinary consumer goods. In effect, social credit imposes a perpetual expectation of ‘good’ behaviour, backed by the full power of the state — an expectation which binds every citizen, and encompasses the entire spectrum of public and private conduct.

Popular accounts in Western media most often cast social credit as both draconian and somehow uniquely Chinese, a sinister, high-tech fusion of Confucian concern for public rectitude with Maoist contempt for the individual. Draconian it may well be. But nobody in the West can afford to be too smug about its appearance. The system was originally inspired by the familiar Western notion of the credit score, in which our creditworthiness — and therefore viability, in a culture in which the extension of credit is the key that unlocks so many of life’s chances — is captured by a number whose rise and fall is contingent on our ability to comply with someone else’s model of prudent behaviour. By making it explicit that the goal of such a system is the suppression of nonconformity, what is happening in China simply says the quiet parts of our own social contract out loud.

This is truly an authoritarianism for our times. On the surface at least, social credit preserves the structure and much of the mood of late-capitalist choice. Rather than relying on the usual furniture of 20th-century totalitarianism to maintain control, it seems to leave power in the individual’s hands. But the consequences of ‘bad’ choices are the same as they would be under any tyranny: untoward expression is kept in check. Behaviour that the state regards as disharmonious, unproductive or disloyal is punished. Any threats to its power are nipped in the bud.

Given that the will to power over others springs eternal in the human heart, it seems obvious that something like social credit would appear at the first moment it was technically achievable. But perhaps it’s worth digging a little further into why it should be arriving at this particular juncture in the history of our species.

One of social credit’s more curious aspects is that it scarcely seems necessary, given the current condition of Chinese society. The Chinese state, after all, can already rely upon the political docility of its population. Having broadly delivered prosperity over the past four decades, and shepherded China’s billion-plus citizens through a transformative rise in standards of living, the ruling Communist Party faces little in the way of internal challenge to its legitimacy. Its heavy-handed stewardship appears perfectly acceptable to most, as long as it remains undergirded by material comfort.

The state simply hasn’t needed exotic technological means to successfully establish near-complete informational and ideological control over its populace, at least on matters that it considers central to its survival. The development and deployment of anything as elaborate as social credit, then, would seem to be breaking a butterfly on a wheel. So why this, why now? The conventional justification is that the need for it has arisen because endemic corruption, fakery, fraud and shoddiness in manufacture have outstripped the government’s ability to manage them with its existing array of tools. In other words, social credit was the ruling elite’s last desperate attempt to bring to heel what it evidently regarded as a nation of swindlers. But what if there were something new and different about the motives underlying the desire for total control in our moment? What if the Chinese state, its citizens and for that matter everyone else on Earth now confront a factor that wasn’t present or significant at earlier epochs in history?

What we can now clearly perceive as it approaches — no longer on the horizon, but with its first effects actually being felt in the structure of our daily choices and experiences — is a reckoning unprecedented in human history. Everyone knows this in their bones, if not always consciously, the officers of China’s State Council as much as you and I: for the first time in our experience as a species, we are in retreat.

Some of our trepidation about this is doubtlessly already being ‘priced into’ our politics, surfacing in the form of nativism, xenophobia, exclusion and the turn toward authoritarian government perceptible worldwide. But the fundamental question of our time is whether we as a species will be able to coordinate a meaningful response to climate shock, at the scale necessary to secure the continuity of our civilisation, without the brutal imposition of discipline from above.

With high-complexity human civilisation on Earth in the balance, it’s easy to imagine the promise of survival being used as a fig leaf for the imposition of the strictest control over personal and collective behaviour. Once you accept this, it’s not so hard to see how social credit fits into the larger picture. What is it other than a mechanism designed to impose a high degree of societal conformity, while maintaining the illusion of consumerist business as usual, at a moment when just about every other source of stability in our lives – job security, health and social care, affordable housing, pensions, a shared media environment — is being blown to shards and fragments around us? By constraining individual freedom, placing brackets around scope of choice and reducing the ambit of personal discretion, perhaps the decadence of our ways can be contained, some bleak continuity eked out, and something like the present distribution of power extended indefinitely into a sharply inclement future. Or so the architects of social credit presumably believe.
And that has significant consequences for those of us who do not happen to live in China. Given both its intellectual roots in the West, and the evident ease with which technological innovation travels, it’s urgent that populations elsewhere grapple with the implications of social credit. The preservation of anything recognisable as a pluralist, multivocal society may depend on it.

There is, admittedly, an aspect of the boy once more crying wolf to this. Having consistently, and over many years, been warned of the threat posed to their liberties by technologies like CCTV and facial recognition algorithms, without perhaps experiencing much actual curtailment of their freedom, it is possible that people in the West have broadly tuned out voices raised in this way. It’s fair to wonder if anyone much will lend an ear now the wolf is actually at the door, or if those expressing alarm at social credit and its implications stand to be dismissed as Cassandras spooked by a mere play of shadows. And Cassandras they may well be. But, then, we so often forget the central point of Cassandra’s tale, which is that she was right all along.