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...
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!
- 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)
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.
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.
I've edited my comment and removed that part.
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.
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
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.