Creemers2018ChinaSCS

Creemers “China’s Social Credit System: An Evolving Practice of Control.”

Bibliographic info

Creemers, R. (2018). China's Social Credit System: an evolving practice of control. Available at SSRN 3175792.

Commentary

"As it stands today, it is mistaken to conceive the ESDiT-shared - OLD 2021-11-03/esditHuman/Social Credit System as a single, integrated entity. Instead, the term covers an entire ecology of fragmented initiatives that share a basic set of objectives, operational frameworks and policy language."
The deep-rooted problem of the existence of SCS in China is well explored in this text from four different sides: historical antecedents for the SCS, emergence and expansion of SC-related notions at the central and local levels of the Party-State, Plan for the Construction of the SCS and from the private sector.
Above all, I find it a disgraceful system and an infringement of so many people's freedoms. The text shows interestingly how it is not just a system that works, it has a deeper background and cannot just disappear again.

Excerpts & Key Quotes

Moral standards

• Page 6:

Enforcing these moral standards justified expansion of the state’s capacity to monitor and discipline the conduct of local officials, and to penetrate grass-roots society. While Thornton analyses a period between the late Empire and the early People’s Republic, these techniques are reflected
even in the current anti-corruption campaign under Xi Jinping33.
The SCS fits squarely in this tradition. From the very beginning, the compliance
problem that the SCS is intended to solve has been framed in moralistic terms.

Comment:

So if I understand correctly, and before the quote even more historical context is provided explaining these "moral standards" of china, the problem of an SCS is deeply rooted in Chinese culture. In short, it is therefore not something that will change if the SCS is banned, for example. Now it's not that easy to ban something for China anyway, but I can imagine that the UN or something like that will say at some point that a SCS is banned, but because of the deep-rooted moral value, an alternative will always surface . If "we" want to tackle this problem in China, there will have to be a campaign that interferes more with moral value and culture.
Birhane2021AlgorithmicInjustice
Awad2018MoralMachine-A

Identification

• Page 20:

A first, fundamental requirement for the system is to ensure everyone subject to it can be identified. This happens at two levels: first, ensuring that there is a uniform filing system that allocates unique identifiers to discrete subjects, and second, disabling actors from acting anonymously

Comment:

Above is almost everything described that we don't want to go into with our Digital Ethics Consultations and values. The Chinese government's goal here is to deanonymize its population and have non-stop surveillance over everyone. ^[1]The most important of these is that the systems can distinguish and identify every object and therefore always have all this information available.

Technology in SCS

• Page 22:

Technological analysis is used, however, to make mass information more manageable, accessible or technologically presentable. For instance, the Big Data Key Scrutiny function within the blacklist system is intended to automatically flag individuals appearing on multiple lists. Similarly, the credit reports in the Honest Shanghai app reflect an integration of data from the existing credit databases.

Comment:

SCS and its developments are of course the perfect example of the dangers of our own developed beautiful AI. At the moment, the technology and amount of AI that is used is not that bad, but there are of course countless possibilities for drawing conclusions in advance about individual citizens of China with AI. For example, if patterns are discovered that buying rice at store X increases the probability Y that you will commit a criminal act, then any action that you thought would be 'correct' is no longer certain. In short, a typical case of whether our smart and largest development of AI is as good as we think it is , if it can benefit such bad systems such as SCS.