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Comment by fspeech | Hacker News Reader

This one looks a little weird (the original quote is very sketchy with little detail) so I researched on it a little. If you search for "私立学校老赖" you can get a picture of what is going on. You can try Google Translate if you don't read Chinese.

Laolai 老赖 refers to those who can afford to pay debts but refuse the court orders to do so. High cost private school tuition is considered luxury spending. So the ability to afford private school is considered constructive evidence of ability to pay debt outstanding.

China needs to figure out a personal bankruptcy system. But it also needs to figure out how to deal with people who hide assets through friends and relatives.

As it stands I doubt this has much to do with social mobility, as some seem to be worried about here.

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Don't you feel your capacity and willingness to do some research and your knowledge of a foreign language and being aware of what is actually being said limits your ability to easily participate in outbursts of online moral outrage?

Not really. It only impacts the ability to be xenophobhic with a specialization in antinonromancy. There are many other opportunities to engage in reactionary outrage, especially in areas of scientific research.

>Laolai 老赖 refers to those who can afford to pay debts but refuse the court orders to do so.

garnishing wages or seizing money from bank accounts isn't a thing in china?

Hiding piles of cash in a neighbours shed or by giving all your possessions to family members, then claiming inability to pay is the problem this is trying to solve.

According to the linked article, social credit can be moved up or down for many reasons: "examples infractions include bad driving, smoking in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games and posting fake news online."

That means that if your social credit goes down for any of these reasons, which are not all financial, then you can be barred from the best schools.

I think it's far more likely to be used to keep top schools (which feed into top gov't/industrial positions) clean of any rabble-rousers.

Private schools aren’t the top ones in China. The top schools are all public (e.g., 人民中学). Private schools are where rich Chinese and foreigners send their kids because (a) they couldn’t get into better schools or (b) they couldn’t get into any public school because the hukou system is so screwed up. There used to be a range of lower cost private schools for migrant worker kids (and probably still is outside of Beijing).

Do you mean that the private schools could use social credit scores to select students? That is possible, maybe even likely. But one would think or at least hope that there will be diversity, as some private schools may then cater to the unmet demands by others. Remember private schools are in the business of competing for both revenue and talents. A "best" private school that refuses to accept the best students may soon find that they are no longer the "best" school anymore.

OP was talking about a government ban. I could only find cases of courts enforcing civil judgement this way at some cities.

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