The city of Suzhou, known as “the Venice of the East” for its web of intricate waterways, captured the imagination of Marco Polo when he journeyed through China more than seven centuries ago.
Today it is drawing attention for another grand project: a sprawling network of databases designed to track the behavior of China’s population.
Sitting next to Shanghai with an economy larger than Finland’s, Suzhou was one of a dozen places chosen last year by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government to run a social-credit trial, which can reward or punish citizens for their behavior.
Illustration: Yusha
The system, dubbed “Osmanthus” after the fragrant flower the city uses as an emblem, collects data on nearly two dozen metrics, including marital status, education level and social-security payments.
Authorities have given it national awards even as Western politicians like US Vice President Mike Pence lambaste social credit as ushering in an Orwellian dystopia that could serve as a model for authoritarian regimes around the globe.
However, dozens of interviews with the people most affected by the system paint a nuanced picture of the technology in its early stages.
Few of the entrepreneurs, volunteers, public servants and other Suzhou residents surveyed said they had even heard of Osmanthus, which is supposed to help shape laws, regulations and standards across China by next year.
Suzhou’s experience raises questions about the dozens of similar scoring projects that local cities are now rolling out.
If residents are unaware of a system designed to change their behavior for the better, then what is the point of having it?
And if it is struggling to take off in a city lauded by authorities, what are the chances it can be implemented effectively across the nation anytime soon?
“China has an interest in overstating its capacity to collect and analyze data, like they overstate their capacity to monitor with surveillance cameras and facial recognition,” said Jeremy Daum, a senior fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School. “They want people to believe that misconduct will get caught.”
A three-story brown and white building near the city center is the public face of Suzhou’s social-credit system. Here individuals can ask questions about their scores.
On a recent Monday afternoon, the building was largely empty. Two staff shuffled papers and typed at computers, while six seats reserved for visitors were vacant. One woman who entered was lost and asked for directions.
The lone self-service machine, emblazoned with logos for Osmanthus and state-owned telecoms company China Unicom, was unplugged.
A female official in jeans and a t-shirt, who only gave her family name Xi, said about 10 people come in each day.
Most are small-business owners who want to verify that they have been removed from a financial credit blacklist after paying off a debt.
She said she has hardly ever seen anyone come in to check their social-credit score.
Proponents of the system says it hews closely to the financial scores, known as FICO, pioneered by William Fair and Earl Isaac in the US in the mid-1950s.
Today, FICO scores form the basis of the vast majority of loans made to individuals in the US — with occasional debates over how they are formulated and whether consumers have enough access to them.
However, China’s social-credit scores arguably go a step further by using the country’s vast surveillance network — public closed-circuit television cameras, payment systems and more — to monitor citizens.
While good behavior — such as volunteering, paying bills on time or avoiding fines for littering — is supposed to be rewarded with financial perks, bad behavior can abruptly leave residents without access to financing and public services.
Osmanthus collects data on individuals from about 20 government departments, including social security and civil affairs, the local administration said. Citizens start out with a neutral 100 points and can build them up to a maximum of 200 through good behavior.
Like many other provinces trialing the system, Suzhou has not yet introduced rules to define bad behavior, or the number of points that can be deducted, but perks for good behavior also are unclear.
Lu Wenting, a Suzhou resident who says she does about 24 hours of volunteer work each week, said that she had never heard of Osmanthus, even though it is supposed to grant public transport benefits to those with high scores.
She found out her own score was a healthy “123” after Bloomberg reporters helped her look it up on the WeChat app run by Tencent Holdings.
About one in eight of the 13 million people monitored in Suzhou had a score above 100 as of August last year, local media reports said.
Only 4,731 were below 100, and all were so-called defaulters who had not paid back loans or had failed to obey court rulings. That leaves more than 11 million people with scores at the baseline.
Still, the idea of punishment is already sparking worries.
A citizen in Yiwu, a city in neighboring Zhejiang Province that is also running a trial, said he was denied a bank loan because a traffic cop deducted three points from his score for failing to give way to pedestrians crossing a street.
Residents with a score of at least 100 points qualify for “civilization loans” with favorable interest rates.
“People from lower levels of society could break rules without knowing and find their scores lowered and get shut out of more and more opportunities,” said Chen Shicai, a resident in Suzhou, expressing worries that social credit could worsen inequality in a country that already grapples with huge wealth divisions.
One problem is how to integrate social credit into existing legal systems to ensure there are checks and balances to prevent abuse. China’s use of technology and informants among the Uighur in Xinjiang suggest that the programs could become more oppressive as they develop.
“I worry that regulations may become too specific, such as parking in the wrong spot,” said Su Su, an insurance saleswoman in Suzhou. “People could end up living in fear, worrying that they are being watched all the time.”
Five provinces or municipalities — Shanghai, Zhejiang, Hebei, Hubei and Shaanxi — have established local credit regulations, but there are no national rules.
Zhejiang and Shanghai placed clear restrictions on data collection that exclude personal information on religious beliefs, genetics, fingerprints, blood types and medical history.
“While most of the trials are leaning towards encouraging people with convenience and perks, local authorities need to exercise caution when it comes to punishment,” said Han Jiaping (韓家平), director of the Credit Research Institute affiliated with the Ministry of Commerce.
“Government at all levels shouldn’t over-punish and infringe people’s privacy and legitimate rights,” Han said.
Another wrinkle is that many residents see more value in competing systems. At the 105-year-old Suzhou Library, citizens with high Osmanthus scores are supposed to be able to get longer book loan periods.
However, library staff said most people checked out books using their Zhima Credit number, a private credit score from Alibaba Group’s Ant Financial.
Few people even ask about their Osmanthus score.
“It’s more like a vanity project,” said Diao Yun, a Suzhou resident who works for a private company. “There’s no promotion of the system in the city — no billboards, no ads or public campaign as far as I see. It’s distant from people’s daily lives.”
Cities and officials looking to build and implement a social-credit system face a bewildering array of official guidelines and documents from China’s State Council and other central and regional government bodies.
Those rules relate to everything from assessing creditworthiness to punishing cultural performances on the internet that have a “heinous” social impact.
In Suzhou, the main roadblock to promoting the system is inter-department squabbling over data sharing and who will pay for perks, according to a report in the state-owned Suzhou Daily.
The paper said only 30 of the 70 departments are sending data directly to the platform, with others worried about transferring information without a legal requirement.
Those teething problems mean that many residents in Suzhou are unaware of the system. None of the staff questioned in the subway, parks and museum knew anything about the scoring system or alleged perks, such as priority non-emergency service at hospitals.
Another problem is at the national level. Xi and his team are engaged in an escalating trade war with US President Donald Trump’s administration that threatens to further hurt growth as companies get caught in the line of fire.
It is not a priority among China’s top leaders to push through a nationwide social-credit scoring system now, even if Suzhou and other localities can set up workable models, said Zhang Jian (張健), an associate professor of government at Peking University.
“President Xi and his government have been caught up ‘fire fighting’ internal and external pressures since last year,” Zhang said. “I doubt the party leaders are willing to expend the time, energy and political capital to roll out the plan.”
Father’s Day, as celebrated around the world, has its roots in the early 20th century US. In 1910, the state of Washington marked the world’s first official Father’s Day. Later, in 1972, then-US president Richard Nixon signed a proclamation establishing the third Sunday of June as a national holiday honoring fathers. Many countries have since followed suit, adopting the same date. In Taiwan, the celebration takes a different form — both in timing and meaning. Taiwan’s Father’s Day falls on Aug. 8, a date chosen not for historical events, but for the beauty of language. In Mandarin, “eight eight” is pronounced
In a recent essay, “How Taiwan Lost Trump,” a former adviser to US President Donald Trump, Christian Whiton, accuses Taiwan of diplomatic incompetence — claiming Taipei failed to reach out to Trump, botched trade negotiations and mishandled its defense posture. Whiton’s narrative overlooks a fundamental truth: Taiwan was never in a position to “win” Trump’s favor in the first place. The playing field was asymmetrical from the outset, dominated by a transactional US president on one side and the looming threat of Chinese coercion on the other. From the outset of his second term, which began in January, Trump reaffirmed his
US President Donald Trump’s alleged request that Taiwanese President William Lai (賴清德) not stop in New York while traveling to three of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, after his administration also rescheduled a visit to Washington by the minister of national defense, sets an unwise precedent and risks locking the US into a trajectory of either direct conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or capitulation to it over Taiwan. Taiwanese authorities have said that no plans to request a stopover in the US had been submitted to Washington, but Trump shared a direct call with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平)
It is difficult to think of an issue that has monopolized political commentary as intensely as the recall movement and the autopsy of the July 26 failures. These commentaries have come from diverse sources within Taiwan and abroad, from local Taiwanese members of the public and academics, foreign academics resident in Taiwan, and overseas Taiwanese working in US universities. There is a lack of consensus that Taiwan’s democracy is either dying in ashes or has become a phoenix rising from the ashes, nurtured into existence by civic groups and rational voters. There are narratives of extreme polarization and an alarming
RSS