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Comment by smdyc1 | Hacker News Reader

This can only be a means for the Chinese Communist Party to exert more authoritarian control over it's population. Depending on the actual implementation, I'd compare this to East Germany except in this case, the social credit system replaces the Stasi and their network of informers. If there is no way to opt out of such a system then freedom of thought and action are potentially gone. My question is, how do they justify such a system when the only apparent threat is to the Chinese Communist Party's waning influence and control in this information age.

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I asked a Chinese national friend of mine. He said that the system sounded good, because it would decrease the rate of crime.

When I brought up privacy concerns, social concerns, etc, he looked at me like I was talking Swahili. I tried bringing up the Stasi, and he didn't know what I was talking about. 1984, had never read it. Secret police... they apparently only go after bad people.

The sorts of things you're talking about are genuinely not on the radar of the average person over there. It would require education they specifically and intentionally don't have. (And, if I were to guess, are encouraged never to learn)

The average mainland Chinese person who attended their public school system will simply not be aware of a great many historical events, such as:

The Stasi

Romanians lynching Ceaușescu

Tiennamen Square (they'll know it exists as an innocent landmark in the capital, not the history of what happened there)

1984 and the whole genre of dystopian police-state literature

It's to be expected that they'll know less about european history and correspondingly more about chinese history. And everyone knows what happened in Tiananmen square. It's living memory.

We could flip it around and talk about how ignorant westerners are of Chinese history..

...flip it around and talk about how ignorant westerners are of their own history.

However, researching, blogging, or talking about such lesser known dark/embarrassing events will not get you or your family barred from travel, public schools, and such.

Well, that's a matter of opinion. How many stories about deplatforming have we had lately?

"But those people are legitimately awful!" you say, and I agree with you, yet.. maybe other cultures have other norms? Maybe we should learn a little Chinese history before we presume to dicatate what their norms should be.

The linked video is pretty good for imparting context on this issue, I'd recommend watching it.

Yeah, I mean, that I expected.

What I wasn't expecting, and still cannot wrap my head around, is how thoroughly ingrained the cultural avoidance is to learning about anything in that intellectual space. I would have expected that upon hearing about such a program, both the thoughts "This might be good" and "This might be bad" would occur to a person, and both be potentially investigated, even if only quietly and internally.

But instead, it seems as if any intellectual space that could be considered even slightly controversial is often avoided by reflex, far before you get the chance to have the "this might be good or this might be bad" thought.

I was going to give an anonymized example of the above, but out of respect for the person have chosen not to do so in such a public forum.

As long as China keeps growing and people's standard of living increases I don't think people will care. The system will face its true test once they have a major economic crisis and people will have doubts about the system. Until then most people will happily go along.

The average mainland Chinese person may also have legitimately nothing to fear from a social credit system. I'm not defending it, but as long as the system does not escalate (which is probably not a given, despite all the slippery slope arguments), the average apolitical person might not even have to care.

I guess the combination of social credit system and censorship makes things particularly insidious, because if you are unjustly affected then you can't appeal publicly. But at the same time, enough people will get good social credit scores that a majority of the population might support the system still.

> The average mainland Chinese person who attended their public school system will simply not be aware of a great many historical events, such as:

> Tiennamen Square (they'll know it exists as an innocent landmark in the capital, not the history of what happened there)

False. I was born in China in the early 80s and I witnessed the 1989 riots during Tiananmen Square on TV (I was in kindergarten). Average mainland Chinese people knows more than you think they do. Albeit, a lot of them would have very different idea of the same historical events.

Chinese here. I dont wanna argue about other misinformation this thread have presented so far but just one thing: Access to the book 1984. jd.com is like amazon equivalent in mainland China (amazon.cn has less traffic there)

Searching 1984 returns: http://search.jd.com/Search?keyword=1984&enc=utf-8&wq=1984&p...

the first item has 93k reviews. On taobao (by alibaba) the search results are: https://www.taobao.com/list/product/1984%E5%A5%A5%E5%A8%81%E...

I dont know where you get the idea that average mainland Chinese person who attended their public school system (we dont really have a private school system yet, for better or worse) are not aware of those things.

Small language note, "public school" is an ambiguous term when used internationally like this.

For whatever reason in the US, Canada (and probably some other countries) "public school" means "free government run school". Meanwhile in the UK (and wikipedia tells me India and Australia) "public school" means "non government school you have to pay to go to".

I'm guessing that you mean the American version of "public school"?

Hey yes. Most Chinese schools and universities are government run and funded majorly by the government. There are a small number of private funded schools (especially English only international schools which are really really expensive) and not many people attend those.

As someone who went to Chinese schools, the hierarchy (at least in my city) was:

Kindergarten, Elementary, and Middle school: private schools were better, or perceived as better. People actively vet their schools if they can, my parents went to 3-4 schools before deciding to send me to one. There used to be a test to get into Middle schools (7-9th grade), but they abolished it, so now parents try to "donate" their way in if they can or somehow pass the interview process. Some public schools were good, but some perception was you could not control for quality, so if you can pay a tuition then you should find a school and pay it.

For high schools (10-12th grade), the public schools reigned king. This is (I think) because you have to take a test to get into. Some private schools are good, but the very very best (multiple kids get into Peiking/TsingHua/Ivy League etc) highs schools are all public and purely meritocratic in terms of getting in.

There are international schools, but those are only open to foreign nationals.

In the UK we use "state school" to mean "free government run school" - does that translate across the Atlantic?

'State school' is used to refer to state (as in United States) funded university or college. This may not be common across all regions though. Private schools for pre-university students are not that common in my area, which I assume has something to do with the specificity of the term here.

Note: I think I was less than clear. In my area 'state school' is a way to refer to university or college that is primarily or entirely paid for by state government.

It's completely non-ambiguous what the parent meant by public school because they contrasted it with private schools.

>> Access to the book 1984. jd.com is like amazon equivalent in mainland China (amazon.cn has less traffic there)

> I dont know where you get the idea that average mainland Chinese person who attended their public school system...are not aware of those things.

I just asked my Chinese friend, and they haven't heard of 1984 and report that they mainly read textbooks in high school or college. They didn't read novels because they weren't tested on that material.

I would guess that mainland Chinese people are less aware of dystopian, anti-authoritarian novels like 1984 than Americans, even if they are available, if only because those books are commonly part of US high-school curriculums and not Chinese curriculums.

True, 1984 is not included in any Chinese textbook. Chinese education system is not the best. We have literature related classes from primary school to high school but they don't include many western works (well translation is one factor I can see). And the way teachers teach them is very very test orientated. We have a big test after highschool called Gaokao which is almost the only factor to decide which college you can go to. Many ppl spend their entire highschool prep for that one test. (There are schools specialized for students retaking this test after they failed the first time, and it takes 1 year to retake.)

During college there's no mandatory literature courses anymore but I was exposed to many western work during that time in my spare time. One reason was I was trying hard to learn English. But I can see many people dont have the incentives to read those even if those works are famous even in China. Many STEM college students in China start to prep for studying overseas once they step into college and all they care is GPA + a good Toefl/GRE score (and there are faster ways of getting good scores for those other than reading literature).

I dare to say many of those STEM students become the friends and coworkers you guys have in US today and they probably haven't "wasted" much time on pondering issues outside of STEM fields or getting their own lives to a better place.

Edit: not appearing in literature textbooks doesn't mean it's not famous or popular in mainland China. Haruki Murakami is also a very popular author whose work is not included in textbooks. He has a book called 1Q84 which was very popular and many Chinese got interested in 1984 because of it.

You might be surprised to learn that they don't know Star Wars either, or Dallas, or Moby Dick.

I met many visiting students, e.g. from India or Bangladesh, who do not know Star Wars, which was kind of a reality check for me, for how deep in a bubble we live.

Yea talk about a bubble: how many Americans know the romance of the three kingdoms or the monkey king? At this point people are just talking past each other, instead of trying to see the cultural factors of another person.

> I would guess that mainland Chinese people are less aware of dystopian

Chinese people does not like reading in general. Extremely few are aware of how gov works, what's the difference between party and state, and what democracy is.

However it not like the Party are actively censor George Orwell's books, it's just so insignificant. In 2016, the chinese Ministry of Education published list of recommended books for middle & high school libraries.

http://ncct.moe.edu.cn/uploadfile/2016/0518/2016051802153430...

You can search for "9787547121290", which is the ISBN for Animal Farm by George Orwell.

I mean, having an organized credit system does seem to be necessary as a fraud/crime prevention measure. Fraud's a problem there. And it's not like our credit system is perfect.. a lot of people would rather have the government run it than some weirdo unaccountable oligopoly.

I feel like whenever Chinese stories come up, people gloss over the US equivalent because they're desensitized to it, while then getting OUTRAGED about those evil Chinese.

This isn't just a way of combating fraud. This is a way of attempting to impart social moores into their populace, that are missing because it is an authoritarian state. There are plenty of ways of combating fraud that do not require 24/7 surveillance and social credit.

The US' system is far from perfect, but this is a strawman. And the problem with the Chinese system isn't that its government run and centralized, there can be centralized credit systems that work well, hypothetically. The problem is with the nature of the program itself, and the obviousness of its intent, despite the stated purpose.

What's obvious specifically about their intent? Did you watch the talk?

Would most Chinese agree with you, or is it only 'obvious' to people who've never set foot in the country?

> I asked a Chinese national friend of mine. He said that the system sounded good, because it would decrease the rate of crime.

The only time I've ever gotten an objective opinion about China from a national was when they became a citizen of another country, had no remaining family there and no intent to return.

> The sorts of things you're talking about are genuinely not on the radar of the average person over there. It would require education they specifically and intentionally don't have.

This is a bit...presumptive, at the least.

Why would you assume ignorance just because people living within reach of the long arm of a Stasi-equivalent refuse to say anything but positive things about the current regime?

They may not have access to science fiction or accurate domestic history books but that doesn't mean they can't see what's going on.

> The only time I've ever gotten an objective opinion about China from a national was when they became a citizen of another country, had no remaining family there and no intent to return.

This appears to be the key. Which of course, takes a generation or two, because its rare that someone leaves and absolutely everyone in the family tree comes at the same time as well.

And of course by that time, the person in question no longer has experience with China.

> The only time I've ever gotten an objective opinion about China from a national was when they became a citizen of another country, had no remaining family there and no intent to return.

That's a little over the top. Chinese people can be open and objective with non-Chinese if you get to know them well. The tricky thing is that if you don't know them well and frame things in an in-group vs. out-group way and seem to criticize their "Chinese" in-group as an outsider, they might feel the need to defend their in-group (China and it's government) whether they believe it or not.

>> The sorts of things you're talking about are genuinely not on the radar of the average person over there. It would require education they specifically and intentionally don't have.

> This is a bit...presumptive, at the least.

They can see what's going on, but they're going to have a different perspective and different sensitivities. E.g. being less attuned to privacy-based skepticism, but more attuned to corruption-based skepticism.

The idea of a social credit score is fantastic. I too believe it would decrease the rate of crime (although that's only a small part of its potential benefits). You don't need to be uneducated or Chinese to see it.

The problem is the way the system is implemented. It's centralized and managed by an authoritarian government. There's no way they can craft a fair and balanced system this way, whether they have good intentions or not.

I think it's a good idea to make people understand the risk of centralized systems (especially when it's for something as important as this), but we shouldn't scare people away from great ideas such as social credit systems.

Do you see a way to make a fair decentralized social credit score? The rules on which participants are scored should be agreed upon. The system should be tamper-proof. A court is needed too.

It's an absolutely terrifying idea with little benefits and some of the scariest drawbacks imaginable.

You decrease crime rate by improving quality of life, by providing good education and healthcare to all citizens. You don't do it by building a surveillance state that reward citizens for supporting the authoritarian government's views (e.g. by spreading the propaganda like you're doing now), while punishing citizens who engage in behaviour that the government doesn't like (e.g. talking about the tiananmen square massacre, concentration camps, organ harvesting, etc.).

>I tried bringing up the Stasi, and he didn't know what I was talking about. 1984, had never read it. Secret police... they apparently only go after bad people.

And why would they? Why should it be obvious that a (presumably young) Chinese person has read the fiction of a British author who fought a civil war in Spain and wrote a book about his personal feud with Stalinism? Are you well versed in Chinese literature, what does the average American know about the politics of China in the last 100 years?

Instead of repeating this decades old Western meme of thinking that our lessons are universal, maybe accept that it genuinely might not be relevant to them, that we don't need to educate them on Orwell and privacy the way we're not educated on Confucianism?

My personal experience in China is that most people perceive the social credit system (and similar sanctions) as a good way to restore every day trust in a rapidly developing country that is plagued by corrupt and slow courts.

China is not America or Western Europe. The state plays a different role in organising social life and people have different expectations of it. Let's debate it on this basis instead of bringing up our highschool reading curriculum.

Yeh they are banned. Why would the CCP not band all those books. It paints them in a bad light.

Is 1984 banned in China (or any of these "all those books" you mention)? A very cool cafe/bookstore I liked when I used to live in Shanghai was the 1984 Bookstore/Cafe in Shanghai [0]

[0]http://www.smartshanghai.com/venue/6931/1984_Book_Store

Just did a cursory search and 1984 (and other Orwell books) are all on sale on the big Chinese ecommerce sites and translated into Chinese. For example here on TMall (Alibaba) [1] - the "dystopian trilogy" I linked here is a box set of 1984, A Brave New World, and We (by Zamyatin).

[1]https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a220m.1000858.1000725....

I slightly disagree. It's not solely about control. It's also about transforming a low trust society into a higher trust society like say Japan. The model society for Chinese leaders in the modern era has always been Singapore. Singapore is sterile, orderly, and unlike mainland China there's a rule of law.

Surprisingly, I'm conflicted with the idea of the social credit system. On the one hand, I don't like intrusive all seeing Big Bro systems. On the other, I really hate low trust societies with a passion, and I would love to see China evolve into a higher trust, if not high trust society. It would be nice to be able to conduct more everyday transactions over there with less paranoia.

Agreed. Also very interesting the fact that they are preventing people from buying airline or train tickets, and a person is forced to take the bus for example.

It seems the second something on hacker News is related to a topic that can be interpreted as negative to the CCP, the downvoting begins.

None of this is criticizing China and Chinese culture, only the authoritarianism of the communist party.

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