Walking Through the Official Document on China' Social Credit System | Hacker News Reader

Walking Through the Official Document on China' Social Credit System

paraditedc.com

98 pointsparaditedc48 comments

Here’s a story of why China is a rather paradoxical state. It’s not pure authoritarianism.

Many people who can’t return loans have their name and id number shown on large digital billboards. The goal is to shame them into returning money.

Sounds dystopian right?

BUT the reason this is done is because these people can squat in their houses (which may bot belong to them) and the police and law can’t do anything. The social backlash of kicking someone out of their sole living space would be huge.

Some lenders do things like send thugs to harrass them or get a court order to freeze their bank accounts.

Yet the “core” of the issues is that “the law is the law” is NOT followed. It has flexibility rooted in human understanding. Often lenders have to meet halfway per a judge’s order b/c otherwise the lendee wouldn’t be able to make a living.

Yeah, it's a good reminder that our views on all other countries (and also groups within our own countries) always lacks a lot of nuance.

I've spent a little bit of time and there and found that this is extremely true, but also equally true of America as well.

For instance, although China is absolutely totalitarian when it comes to political freedom, freedom of speech, and even freedom of thought (in fact, far more authoritarian than neoliberals will ever admit), you do feel a lot more "free" at the _street level_. There are basically no traffic laws, you can drink and smoke wherever you want, you can set up a shop on the side of a sidewalk, you can make and sell bootlegs of anything you want - you can even piss and shit in the middle of the street without so much as a second thought about it (this is disgustingly common there.)

On the flip side, in America I can (ostensibly) say whatever you want politically, but I can't legally drink a beer on the sidewalk. I can't open a certain type of shop in a certain area. I can't sell products which use such-and-such technology. I can't even cross the street at certain times and places. Land of the free!

To quote Erlich Bachmann speaking to Jin Yang, “This is Palo Alto... we don’t have the freedoms you have in China.”

Interestingly you can set up a microcosm of (many of) the Chinese freedoms you describe in the U.S., but not vice versa.

I can buy some unincorporated land, build a street, and let people piss and shit and sell food and knockoff purses.

However I can’t buy land in China and set up an area with a free newspaper.

This is because the U.S. prohibitions you cite are de facto prohibitions while the Chinese ones are actually human rights not granted by the state.

It’s a somewhat academic distinction in terms of our day to day lives, but it’s meaningful when talking about what social movement tactics are available to us.

> The social backlash of kicking someone out of their sole living space would be huge.

Are there examples of how this kind of social backlash manifests? As an outsider, I have a hard time understanding or seeing it if/when it occurs.

that State "problem" seems to be solved when they finish moving to a cashless model (like the US) and then you stay at home but can't but absolutely nothing to live on.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy the need to be sensitive toward optics of evicting defaulting homeowners when the government rounds up and exports populations en masse. See internment camps, dam clearing, etc.

Furthermore, you're completely sidestepping the most dystopian aspects of the social credit system, which takes peoples' personal views into account and is as much a vehicle for thought policing as anything else

This article smells. Like a bad code smell.

Especially since we have the Chinese government freely admitting [1] that they will restrict travel to regular citizens for "spreading false information about terrorism, causing problems on flights, using expired tickets, smoking on trains, failing to pay social insurance or failing to pay fines", according to the National Development and Reform Commission’s website.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-credit/china-to-bar...

The issue I have with the Reuters article is that it doesn't link to the statement on the website. It would be great if western media, when talking about this, actually provide proof to the official documents - especially if they're online.

Question: Don't western countries also restrict your ability to travel during court proceedings? The court says you're a flight risk so they take away your passport or don't give you bail, right? (At least in the USA). Most of these things they listed are felonies in China, so I can see why they wouldn't want you to leave before appearing in court and paying your fines.

I remember reading some other analysis on the Chinese Social Credit System proposals, and it seemed to really just restrict people's travel if you're in the middle of court proceedings (maybe from smoking on trains, using expired tickets, spreading false information about terrorism - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1038 says this is punishable in USA for up to 5 years...).

EDIT: source article is http://www.chinatax.gov.cn/n810341/n810755/c3359637/content....

As noted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18250502, Reuters is wrong to include trains in their reporting.

In context, this is just restricting plane travel. And they list a bunch of plane / airport - related infractions plus social infractions (such as basically white collar crime, which after 2008 seems like something USA needs to do too).

In context, basically restricting your ability to travel with planes if you do any of these airplane/airport related things: 1) spread false rumors about terrorism as related to air travel, 2) using others people's or using fake ID or fake boarding passes, 3) and a bunch of listings of committing crimes in airplanes and airports (fighting, stopping people from performing their jobs, stealing, smoking where you can't etc...) That sounds reasonable to me.

The article also says to restrict air travel for non-airplane/airport things such as (mostly white collar crimes as I mentioned above): 1) if you're accused in a large tax avoidance / tax related court case, 2) illegally manipulating accounting or faking or lying about finances and not paying back debts (doesn't specifically say personal or corporate, but I assume it's the latter), 3) didnt pay the social insurance for employees AND refusal to remedy the situation ( I assume the managers/directors would be the one punished here), 4) securities and futures deemed illegal and fined and fines haven't been paid, or basically a public company not doing what it says it publicly said it would do, 5) people deemed by the courts to have lost social credit (this one seems like can be manipulated, as courts could deem you to have lost social credit from maybe a train-specific legislation, and thus restricting your plane travel too), and 6) says relevant parties that identify more categories of actions of depleting trust should be added and amended.

If anyone is interested I might do a more specific write up of this. I kind of just translated as I read so might have some mistakes, in which case please let me know and I will amend

Is the statement in English? If it's not, it wouldn't be worth much to link the source as people wouldn't really be able to audit it. Even with translation services, there's a lot of nuance that might get lost.

I would appreciate a link to the original article (I and many millions of people outside China can read Chinese). Primary sources and all

If a huge news organization like Reuters does not have a native Chinese speaker on staff or at least a fluent speaker to read over Chinese documents when reporting on them, well, we have fallen farther than I thought.

That wasn't the point. While Reuters can (and likely has) done that, how beneficial is it for the viewer to see there's a primary source they can't understand on their own.

Not all viewers will be unable to understand the source. On a few occasions where another newspaper cited a German source and linked to it, I was able to determine that the original German article had simply been misinterpreted. Chinese speakers could do the same for sources in Chinese. Obfuscating sources just makes it harder to find out about such translation mistakes.

Second, even readers who do not understand the source themselves might need to know some specific detail contained therein (e.g. your company operates in China and you want to know how you might be affected). They could hire a professional translator to help them understand it.

The reason Reuters (and most other news sites) don't link to sources is probably that they don't want traffic to leave their site. They'll happily link to tangentially related articles on their own site, though.

Hey, thanks for pointing this out. I have updated it at the bottom of the article.

To clarify, I intended to write about this in this post initially, but somehow got carried away by the original document, so it ended up being just a walk through of the original document without the new additions and measures.

I think it does make sense to add additional information like this to the post to make it more complete and up-to-date.

Update:

found the original source (in Chinese) in case anyone is interested: http://www.chinatax.gov.cn/n810341/n810755/c3359637/content....

2nd Update:

It appears that Reuters made a mistake in their reporting, the ban is only for planes, not trains, according to the official document I linked above.

If anyone knows to get Reuters to correct its article, please let me know!

yeah, I did a little summary in my comment below if anyone is interested

Reuters is correct. See my comment above:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18261549

The Reuters journalist said:

- there are multiple documents about the social credit system, not just from the tax bureau

- people have definitely been banned from high speed rail

- two official docs from NDRC confirm this

(I haven't received links to the docs yet, but will reply to this comment when I do)

Yes, you are right. There are 2 sources from NDRC on this. So Reuters is correct in their reporting. I've found the them on NDRC website:

http://www.ndrc.gov.cn/zcfb/zcfbtz/201803/t20180316_879618.h...

http://www.ndrc.gov.cn/gzdt/201803/t20180316_879653.html

I've updated the links in my post as well.

It would have saved me and them the trouble if Reuters actually provided the sources.

"It would have saved me and them the trouble if Reuters actually provided the sources."

If we want them to do this, we need to start telling them. To anyone interested in seeing Reuters start including links to sources, a good first step is to email:

brian.moss@thomsonreuters.com

He handles enquiries about reporting standards.

EDIT: removed first paragraph, which I pasted in error from a chat message.

Hi, I read your first paragraph a few times and I am not still not sure what you mean. Can you explain a bit?

Sorry, I pasted the info from a chat message and, after adding some text, didn't fully remove the rest of the context.

I've edited my comment and removed that part.

Not to mention their attempts to justify it while providing exactly zero justification for why they are using proxies that are completely irrelevant to their ability to pay when they already have a shadow banking system. The character judgements are a downright primitive basis for lending - the kind that lead to duels over credit rating essentially until financial institutions replaced them.

The real why is as obvious as why they don't like it when people bring up June 4th, 1988 Tiananmen Square or disparage Mao despite the divorce from his policies - it is about control and everything else is just an excuse.

A government has no credit itself build up a credit system for its subjects. Before CCP grabs power in 1949, they promised a western democracy system. 30 years ago until 1 or two years ago they push for a one child policy and promised that the government will take care of old people. Both promises and many others not listed here they now just pretend never happens. This whole social credit system shit is just try to have a more strong control to the slaves who can not vote and take their organs etc easily when necessary.

This is interesting, but kind of odd that the mandarin quotes weren't translated in an otherwise English article.

Ah, I see. I overlooked the fact that it would be odd for people who can't read them.

Anyway, the reason I didn't translate them is partly because there's a lot of nuances in the language and any attempt to translate them would inherently require some level of interpretation and potentially cause misunderstanding. Also at the time, I was too tired from reading and summarizing the document already.

> Anyway, the reason I didn't translate them is partly because there's a lot of nuances in the language and any attempt to translate them would inherently require some level of interpretation and potentially cause misunderstanding.

Welcome to translation?

Would you please stop being a jerk on HN? We've had to ask you way too many times.

I've held off banning you because you've posted good stories, but at some point it's not going to be worth it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FWIW, most of the quotes are directly next to their summary in the English article. I didn't check all of them (because I'm slow at reading Chinese, those quotes are officialese and there's no lang="zh-cn" attribute so some of the characters have odd shapes) but I think you don't miss much if you can't read them.

In the west, the classic fictional story of dystopia seems to be the complete subjugation of the individual to the collective.

E.g. you become a cell enslaved to a body of "society" - a sort of emergent A.I. that's not necessarily under anyone's control.

It would be great if somebody could translate this article, since the commentary doesn’t make a lot of sense if you can’t read the source material.

> For rewards, it mentions giving awards and publicity to model individuals and companies. Various sectors will have “green lanes” given to “those with integrity and credibility”, for priority and simplified processes. Note that this section does not mention scores, it merely says “诚实守信者”, meaning people with integrity and credibility.

Scary. I will say with all of the "vague context", "it appears", "I don't know", etc that this post is as speculative as the Western ones. I appreciate the impartial tone of the article. To the author, would you care to share your opinions on the system personally, i.e. whether it's a good thing? Also, do you have any anecdotal insight on how common citizens view it behind closed doors?

Hey. Sorry for the late reply. I'd be sure post new articles on this as follow-up once I have my personal experience with the system with my next trip to China.

Thanks. I was hoping for your opinions on the ideas rather than the implementation. Judgement based on experience/anecdote has less value due to the sheer size of the implementation.

Honestly speaking, I practice a lot of doubethink. So my opinions are quite worthless, and I'd rather just talk about facts and stats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink

How much social credit do i lose by visiting a mosque or church?

What is the meaning of "circulation" in the section Business Credibility?

Hey, the exact translation for the word does seem a bit odd, but I searched online and there doesn't seem to be good equivalent term in English, the translations are generally either circulation, market or currency.

So I will translate the explanation I got from the Chinese wiki[1]:

The field where the medium of exchange of goods is currency

[1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/流通领域

Then the English would be "currency exchange".

According to my experience with the phrase "currency exchange", it means exchanging currencies, not exchanging goods using one particular currency as the medium of exchange. So it would be a wrong translation.

Here's a good thread I read recently dispelling a lot if the myths about the system:

https://www.twitter.com/isgoodrum/status/1043643948185468928

It seems a lot of the news is driven by a strong anti-China, even McCarthyist bias.

most posts on the site aim to "debunk" the myth of Chinese products being a security risk and that Westerners just overreacting

Hey, I wrote all 5 articles and I think only the 5th one on Huawei fits your description?

Appreciate if you can provide some feedback on how to be less biased, if that's what you mean.

If you write about topics the mainstream media have reported on, it's easy to end up looking like an apologist. The media tend to focus on negative stories because negativity drives attention. Unless you deliberately put your stories through a similar filter (why I'm not suggesting you should do), they'll be more positive than the audience has come to expect.

You could somewhat avoid that by writing about lesser-known topics. Some suggestions: image-retouching apps like B612/Faceu (although I recall some outrage about their skin-whitening effect making it to Twitter) and Chinese-only games (I know there are some big ones, but I haven't even been interested enough so far to find out whether "吃鸡" means to lose or to win).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com