Sesame Credit - The Chinese government is turning being an obedient citizen into a videogame
Buttercheese
Member Posts: 3,766
in Off-Topic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI
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Though I *really* wish this is a hoax.
33160 Points bengoshi
Damn you! *fist shake*
A couple articles (https://www.techinasia.com/china-citizen-scores-credit-system-orwellian and http://thediplomat.com/2015/05/chinas-new-social-credit-system/) suggest that the system isn't quite like the video describes. There are three separate scores which aren't related. Two of them are the result of private corporations' data collection. That said, the Chinese government could gain access to them, though they seem like normal credit scores. But foreign media may have made this up to be much more dangerous than it actually is, or will become.
That said, this isn't entirely new and not entirely implausible. The dang'an is a currently-existing document they use right now which does in fact track some of the stuff the above video fretted about. It records hints about one's political loyalties, among other things. It's a secret document that you cannot see unless you have some clout within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and it can determine your prospects for promotion within the CCP. But it's my understanding that this document hasn't been used very much since the 1990's.
The CCP has good reason to try and implement this sort of system. The CCP has been unable to get people excited about the official state ideology in years. Not many people are passionate about socialism these days, what with the government being socialist in name only (America is far more socialistic than China in terms of our public programs). The CCP is extremely concerned with its domestic image and pays close attention to public opinion polls. The CCP would want to know who feels the most loyalty to the Party, and it would like a system that promotes that sort of attitude.
The video describes a system in which the CCP uses a comprehensive database to reward loyalty and punish disloyalty, and help encourage people to make themselves into more patriotic, pro-Party Chinese. The CCP would like this. It would be a big deal to them.
Does the CCP plan on implementing this sort of system? Maybe. The thing is, China is an authoritarian country--it's not a totalitarian country. The Chinese government has standards. It's not North Korea. The CCP may recognize this sort of system could backfire. I'm fairly certain they would try to implement it if they thought it could bring the results the video fears.
Could it? Maybe not.
Chinese are smart people. They are surrounded by propaganda, but they don't believe all of it. The People's Daily, the CCP's flagship newspaper, is taken seriously by many Chinese. To others, it's a joke. A friend of mine has said that the US has just as much propaganda as China, but the American kind actually works.
Sometimes the Chinese government scores big points with its people. Xi Jinping, the current leader of China, has made his anti-corruption campaign his calling card, and people love him for it. And when the Chinese government talks tough about the South China Sea and Japan's conduct during WW2 or the latest visit by a Japanese PM to the Yasukuni Shrine, the public gets angry and they like what the government is saying and doing. And everybody likes the economic growth, year after year.
Other times, the Chinese government just isn't that popular. Pollution is obvious. Food safety problems are obvious. Corruption is still highly visible. And though many Chinese view the national government positively, they hate their local officials, whose conduct they see up close, and whose power they experience regularly.
So if the Chinese government starts up a highly visible project that so obviously rewards people for posting links to Party articles, and punishes them for buying Japanese media, Chinese people are going to notice. Some are going to think it's great, and buy into it. Others will dislike it and distrust it. Not everybody is going to fall for the trick. This won't necessarily inspire people to fall in line. Some people will get pissed, even though there's no violent crackdown. Why?
Because it would make the government's hand much more visible. It would remind people, constantly, that the government was trying to control them. Chinese already see that every day, in the form of propaganda, but they recognize that propaganda for what it is. Not everybody likes it.
The system the video describes does have a lot of potential. Properly executed, and with a little luck, it would give the Party a kind of immunity to criticism (which they want but are having trouble constructing). But this method of social control has the peculiar disadvantage of being extremely obvious. Chinese will realize they're being manipulated, and they will resist, just like they resisted various other forms of social control.
What do I mean by resist? Not much. Chinese these days aren't very big on revolutions. Even with a lot of history relatively suppressed, there are painful memories of the Cultural Revolution, in which dissent was violently crushed in every sphere of life. There's often a lot of talk about the inevitable demise of the CCP, but the CCP keeps holding on to power. They're good at it. And the ordinary Chinese is doing too good to view an unknown alternative government as superior.
Also, pro-democracy Chinese are probably the least likely to take over in the event of a coup of some sort. More likely, we'd see a military coup if Party control over the military dissolves (the Chinese military, the People's Liberation Army, is a Party army, not a national army) or a popular revolution if the Chinese economy goes really bad (and not just dropping down a few percentage points, but seeing massive unemployment and the life) or a smaller-scale revolution if China's most militant nationalists decide the Party isn't keeping the country safe from foreigners.
None of those things are particularly close to happening.
So what kind of resistance would there be? People would complain, more people would protest, and the Party would be unhappy about it and be afraid of instability, but things would mostly keep chugging on as usual.
Mass protests have been increasing in frequency every year for decades. The Party's attempts to stop them from happening have failed (though I'm sure the Party has managed to decrease their occurrence). Mass protests without government approval are illegal in China. This can't possibly go on forever, but the situation is fairly stable overall, largely because the Chinese government is still very good at promoting the economy, and that's kind of a big deal (especially to a population that is as materialistic as China's, and that's not just a stereotype).
We're probably not going to see a big overhaul in how China works, even if this thing is real. The government will try another method of social control, and like others, it will have a limited success but the problem will keep growing.