Beijing’s municipal government is to assign residents and firms “personal trustworthiness points” by 2021, state media reported yesterday, pioneering China’s controversial plan for a “social credit” system to monitor citizens and businesses.
The system’s rollout has attracted international headlines, sparking comparisons to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, with critics saying it could massively heighten the Chinese Communist Party’s already strict control over society.
In a road map plan released in 2014, China said it would by 2021 create a “social credit system” to reward or punish individuals and corporations using technology to record various measures of financial credit, personal behavior and corporate misdeeds.
However, it had not made any mention of using points, as proposed by Beijing’s municipal government in a plan released on Monday to improve the city’s business environment.
Lists of data, actions and measures would be used to create a trial system of “personal trustworthiness points” for residents and companies in the capital.
The term used can also be translated as “creditworthiness” or “integrity.”
The plan did not include details of how the point system would work.
However, information from the system could affect market access, public services, travel, employment and the ability to start businesses, with trustworthy people being provided a “green channel” and those who are blacklisted being “unable to move a step,” it said.
“This is an important novel approach by Beijing to assess individuals’ credit and tie it to their whole life,” an unnamed official from the municipal state planner said, according to Xinhua news agency.
The plan also should serve as an example to the rest of the nation for how to improve behavior, Xinhua said.
A second system would also be set up to assess the trustworthiness of government officials and departments by measuring whether contracts and promises are honored, the results of which would be included in performance assessments.
The social credit system, which is being built on the principle of “once untrustworthy, always restricted,” would encourage government bodies to share more information about individual and business misdeeds to coordinate punishments and rewards.
Some experts said that the system remains nascent and could help tackle social problems such as fraud or food security.
They said that punishments are mostly restricted to industry-specific blacklists rather than a holistic score.
A system for penalizing people blacklisted for such offenses as failing to pay court-mandated fines that was put in place by the central government was extended in March.
The penalties include banning offenders from making luxury purchases, such as tickets for flights or high-speed railways, for up to a year.
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