It's just as effective to punish dissent by slowly but surely ruining the life of those who express dissenting opinions. That way, instead of making dissenters into martyrs, you just make them look like losers.
Very clever, China.
"Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself." -On Liberty
The amount of discussions about voting even on HN makes it quite clear that even here we are engaging in social-engineering through votes. We see all over the place how people are starting comments with "I know I'll be downvoted for this, but...". Implicit in that is the admission that it takes an extra temptation or push to post something we know will face social sanctions.
Of course this scoring mechanism is worse than getting downvoted on HN or Reddit, but that does not make the comparison irrelevant.
Engineering implies some kind of plan. This is just people projecting their individual opinions in aggregate. It looks like social engineering because the majority of people's opinions in a group like this don't differ all that much.
It's all a stupid game. People say "I know I'll be downvoted but..." to make themselves seem brave against the overwhelming oppression of people on the internet disagreeing with their opinions. Then other people see that and think "that is a brave person, have an upvote." All of this relies on implicit buy-in of the notion that bad things happen if people know how your opinions are different.
Especially in the West, it's very easy to opt out of this game. Just stop worrying if people in your network like you. The people close to you will love you regardless of your stupid opinions and character flaws. There's not much reason to worry about anyone else, especially with how fast people cycle in and out of social networks.
But is it, really? Introducing arbitrary, statistically irrelevant incentives into the rating only goes to undermine the rating's effectiveness: gauging the financial risk. In the end it is a penalty imposed on Chinese banking and overall economy.
They could have done the same with direct cash transfers, but here they're leveraging the credit system to make it less blatant (you can pretend to yourself the loan you got wasn't because you pushed your neighbour into withdrawing those posts) and seemingly more rewarding (they just need to finance whatever increased bad credit it causes, so the overall amounts will be larger than if they spent the same on direct transfers).
As a credit score, yes, it's clearly flawed. As a means of controlling the population? It remains to be seen how it'll work for them, but the cost/benefit tradeoff for the Chinese government is whether it costs more or less than maintaining the same control with police and censors.
If they thought you really were a threat you were executed rather than being sent to a camp.
I can recommend Anne Applebaum's book:
True, but the threat of deportation was nonetheless one of the Nomenklatura's weapon of choice. Someone's death was, even in the aftermath of the WW2 mass carnage, perceived as brutal mean of "solving" problems and could spur further backslash/dissidence. Someone's separation from their social circle however, was a much more safer method and the perpetrators were able to sleep at night because there could hardly be any retribution for such a thing.
While at this, Soviets also made experiments with people, and I think this was to some extent done out of sheer curiosity for information.
For instance, take a group of men, split them to three and send them to build a canal (dig earth with shovel, cut down trees with hand saw, use these methods to build embankments for a canal).
One of the groups gets "normal" rations (which are far below what is needed to survive). One group gets a little bit more bread, another group gets even less. Then set them to work, and observe how quickly each of them dies. This enables you to optimize a conversion ratio of bread-and-people to kilometres-of-canal.
Soviets studied this, and their then-friends the Nazis came to observe and study and then refined the methods later on.
[0] https://books.google.fi/books/about/Kremlin_kellot.html?id=K... (written by Arvo "Poika" Tuominen, a Finnish communist who was in close contact with Stalin in 1930's. Unfortunately only in Finnish)