China is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4B citizens
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
Credit card companies are already doing things like this.
What one of the executives there did, he looked at how people were using Canadian Tire credit cards and tracking what products they actually purchased. Then he found out that people, who for instance buy premium wild bird seed, it turns out that they very infrequently went bad on their debts. Whereas people who bought chrome accessories for their car, they walked away from their debts more frequently.
https://www.marketplace.org/2009/05/15/business/how-credit-c...
Not defending China, but boogeymen pieces like this evoke responses like this is a truly non-western concept and not just a "hardcore" version of what we have
Growing up, we cared what the neighbours thought. They were our "social score". If we skipped school, it'd be noticed. If we misbehaved, they knew it. And little old ladies ensured bad news travelled faster that twitter.
Now life feels anonymous, and it feels like this has been lost. Anonymity, while sometimes valuable, often leads to toxic behaviour online. A lot of things we'd never have dreamt of doing with the 'old lady brigade' judging us. And now the real world feels much more anonymous, and I fear the same happening here too.
On the face of it, it seems like China have figured out how to scale the little old ladies. This could be horribly interesting, or simply horrible. But I think I'm glad to see someone (else) give it a shot.
I don't find myself on the right of everything, I also don't do stuff that's breaking the laws. I'm in favor since I believe the system has more benefit than its downside. Credit system provided by private companies just won't work as much.
I would ask Westerners to look long and hard at our financial credit systems and ask whether they allow dissent or whether we have simply accepted that dissent is a largely fruitless endeavor.
But basically I don't believe we're on a healthy path at the moment. While I don't think this system would work for us either, from a purely nerd standpoint it's interesting to see some experimentation. Whether it works or not, we can learn something from it either way.
On a side note, this is what happens when "technocrats" become the ruling class in overwhelming majority. Ability to apply technical solution to societal problems. Most of the China's ruling class are technocrats. We need anthropologists, social scientists, philosophers as law makers. Yes technocrats should be there in the mix too but they alone won't fix societal problems.
But in the modern era this has broken down, in part because China has gone through 4 different basic political and economic systems in the last century, and is now on its fifth.
So the government is now trying to enforce good behavior and social trust from the top down. Unfortunately, unlike in Confucianism, there is no way to ensure the people at the top are trustworthy, so the whole thing will likely become quite dysfunctional at some point.
It takes compassion and faith in truth, in sufficiently large doses, to challenge such systems.
It takes compassion and faith in truth, in sufficiently large doses, to challenge such systems.
Principles can be used to challenge such systems from within. The overall history of the United States is a good example of this. Also, the history of the past several years is a testament to what happens when principles are forgotten in favor of feelings.
There are so many things wrong with China and the world today, there is simply no reason to make things up, and much of what is in this piece is wild speculation or outright fabrication, belittling the real struggles of some featured in it.
More: https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/seeing-chinese-social-cred...
Marginalizing minority views and other edge-cases is a feature of the system.
I feel very sad that there is likely to be an entire generation of Chinese whom are crushed into the most extreme pressure to conform and obey.
#Resist #QuestionAuthority #Disobey
My reading is that they're worried about their explosive GDP growth leveling out and the political instability a debt crisis might cause.
If you want to watch for change in behavior - increasing or reducing of oppression - in the Chinese system, look at consequences and restrictions (ie applied action derived from their policing systems), rather than things like surveillance broadly. They will always max out surveillence and awareness where they can (the people de facto have no rights, so these things are not viewed as abuses of existing rights), short of becoming a liberal Western-style democracy (which isn't going to happen). The consequences and oppression/restrictions will change depending on the regime's aims, that's where you can best judge the nature of a given government that is in power.
To use a classic surveillence example - the US Government during the Hoover era didn't voluntarily restrict its reach. They were heavily limited by the technology of the day in what they could do. As technological limitations lifted, the expansion of surveillence leapt forward accordingly. Nothing actually changed, Hoover would have been doing what the NSA is doing today, if he had the technology back then.
"credit system" is far less established than countries like US, and private companies are generally much less trusted by the government and by the people (which is the opposite to the US). Some big private companies like Alibaba has started to create credit systems themselves, but the state owned banks and law enforcement would only use something backed by the government.
The "social credit system" it actually not that different from other credit systems excepted it is managed by government. It's really needed now given that there was a rising debt default problem -> Without a credit system, many people thought they can just delete the app where they borrowed money and get away with it. It became a crisis when a lot of this happened at the same time.
Surveillance is a separate topic. It's one of the technology advances that made law enforcement easier (like DNA samples are much more used nowadays in identifying criminals). There has been reports that criminals being captured with these new tools. It's something that western people fears a lot, so all the western reports focuses on the negative side of it and exaggerate it many times more.
But if you were opposed and spoke out, you would be punished, so why should we trust you to be saying what you really believe?
But even if what you say is true, it means that that speaking out has no impact on governmental policy, since if you start to have influence on the public you get shut up. And if that is the case, why should anyone ever bother to speak out.
Why don't you just admit it, you like living in a dictatorship.
>In 2015, Hu lost a defamation case after he accused an official of extortion.
>Hu’s social media accounts, where he published much of his investigative journalism, have also been shut down.
Of course they're not identical situations. Look beyond the regional cultural standards and different bodies exercising power. Notice that they're both a hegemony enforcing the status quo against their flavor of "fake news".
He tells his share of lies. But he also tells his share of truth. No different than any other "news" organization. If he is telling lies, then point it out, debate them. Don't censor them. If lying is grounds for censorship, then every newspaper needs to be shutdown. They all lie or fabricate from time to time. Did we forget about the iraq war and the media lies that allowed it to happen? Or brian williams or the recent florence weather channel farce?
> around them so he can sell them harmful junk
How is that any different than CNN showing pharmaceuticals ad on their network to their vulnerable elderly viewership? Or news putting gambling ads? Should MSNBC or Foxnews be banned because they have soda or potato chip ads? I'd say alex jones is responsible for a minuscule amount of the harmful junk in this country compared to the mainstream media.
> And he didn't even get censored, he got kicked off some platforms like twitter.
That's called censorship.
> To compare him to an actual victim of censorship who was trying to get the truth out is an example of bothsidesm that is attempting to masquerade as rational thought.
He is a victim of censorship. You may support him being censored, but to say he wasn't censored is an outright lie. You can censor people telling truth and people telling lies. It's both censorship.
My god stop watching so much CNN. It's great that you distrust alex jones. Everyone should. But everyone should distrust all media personalities. Skepticism is a very healthy part of citizenship and democracy. And censorship is evil in a democracy. Nothing more harmful than censorship and the people who support it for their political agenda. Nazis, fascists, communists and all extremists love censorship for a reason. Democracies love free speech for a reason.
They should make their own self-assessment and figure out what works form them by themselves.
Ther system evolved from different badic principles and that has arrived at diffetent conclusions.
That said, things can radically change as in Japan during WWii —> Pracetime transition, but that requires buy-in from all involved to avoid what usually happens during radical change (Tsarist to Sowiet; Dynasty —> Republic —> PRC).
When the EU, Australia and Canada does it, the news frames it positively as combating "hate" speech. When china does it, it's digital dictatorship.
For an industry, especially so in australia, that loves censorship and digital dictatorship, the media sure do love to criticize china about theirs. Maybe it's just envy.