Fragmented Reality, Cohesive Ideology: Navigating Data-Driven Public Policy in China’s Social Credit System - p. 35-64

Abstract

In 2014, the State Council of the People’s Republic of China published the Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System, with the project scheduled for completion in 2020. This emerged as a response to a series of issues specific to Chinese society, such as food safety, the promotion of economic trust, or the enforcement of judicial decisions, which were believed to stem from breaches of social trust (信用 / xinyong). In this sense, the Social Credit System aims to collect data on the trustworthiness of individuals and institutions, also serving as the foundation for a system based on rewards and sanctions. The topic received a great deal of attention in the international press, with the Social Credit System often portrayed by Western media as a unified mechanism, representing the beginning of an Orwellian dystopian world. However, journalists and some researchers showed much greater confidence in the project than the Chinese administration itself, since reality on the ground could not keep pace with the authoritarian imagery being presented. The discourse of the Western press proved to oversimplify and distort the analysis of a project that turned out to have other priorities and to be far more fragmented than had been assumed. Nevertheless, certain questions have proven legitimate. Such a data-collection effort does indeed raise issues regarding the confidentiality of the information processed and the difficulty of regulating the procedures undertaken. By analyzing the project’s development over these six years, this paper seeks to clarify the Social Credit System, so that we may move from a discourse still marked by ideological undertones to one upon which we can build a rigorous analysis of its implications.