Residents of China have already felt the consequences of the introduction of the social credit system
As "Russkaya Germaniya" notes, the social credit system grew out of an attempt to create a national credit mechanism. Initially, Chinese economists assumed that their developments would be used exclusively by banks to assess the reliability of borrowers. The mechanism began to be developed back in 1999 and was implemented over several years.
However, in 2012, China's National Development and Reform Commission decided to use the existing developments and strengthen the assessment of the qualities of Chinese citizens by including social and political spheres in the financial rating. The term "moral index" began to appear in documents. It was assumed that the social credit system would control the reliability not only of individuals, but also of companies and government agencies. However, in fact, government agencies were excluded from the scope of assessments.
The system today is supposed to work as follows. Initially, each citizen receives a starting rating of 1000 points. A unified information center analyzes each person according to 160,000 different parameters from 142 institutions. If a person behaves "well" – pays taxes and utility bills on time, repays loans, does not get caught for traffic violations, does not criticize the authorities, does not belong to sects, and (attention!) does not spend hours playing computer games – then he is a good citizen.
If his rating is 1050 points or higher, he is marked with an AAA index. Such a person has all doors open – he will be hired for a good job or admitted to study, given a loan at a low interest rate, prioritized for surgery, and so on. Those with the lowest credit – D (599 points and below) will not be sold a plane ticket and will not even be hired for the lowest-paying job.
The system operates not only at the level of government agencies, but also at the household level. For example, holders of a high rating can rent bicycles for free, while holders of a low rating must not only pay for the rental but also leave a deposit. And so on in everything. It may take years to raise the rating, but the system's developers assure that it is possible – just "behave well".
Naturally, this system has many critics, especially among human rights activists. The system involves total surveillance of citizens, infringes on the rights and freedoms of the "unreliable", and violates the principle of respect for and protection of human rights – especially the right to reputation.
However, the social credit system is criticized not only for this. It has many technological problems, the main one being the lack of uniform rules of the game. During the development of the system, each region and each government agency created its own credit platforms, as a result of which information exchange between them is very difficult.
The main links of the credit system are cities and districts at the provincial level. The systems of different cities are not integrated with each other. The information they collect and the assessment mechanisms they set rarely coincide. For example, in some regions, the rating system grants the right to special conditions for using libraries, while in other regions, libraries are completely excluded from the scope of this mechanism.
Millions of Chinese citizens are already suffering from the imperfection of the system. As of June 2019, 27 million people were on the blacklist restricting air travel, and another 6 million people could not use high-speed trains. In total, approximately one in every hundred residents of the Celestial Empire turned out to be unreliable. 70% of citizens who participated in a survey in July 2020 expressed concern about the misuse of the social credit system.
Chinese authorities partly acknowledge the imperfection of the system. However, there is no talk of abandoning it in the future. The top leadership promises to reform the rating and establish uniform standards. But while they are absent, Chinese citizens can only rely on chance and hope that they will not become victims of random errors and miscalculations of a mechanism whose operation even its creators do not fully understand.