Life on the wrong side of China’s social credit system
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In California you can't even register your vehicle if you're behind on your child support payments. (I need my job to make payments. I can't get to my job without my car.)
Try taking it to the logical conclusion - what else is a privilege, and can therefore be arbitrarily denied? A bank account? Traveling by plane or train? Connecting your house to the power/water/sewage grid? Having a post address? Buying or renting a house? Sending your children to school? If you buy this logic, there's a whole bunch of 'privileges' that the state can deny you using some excuse, that would make living utterly impossible.
That the state takes away this right doesn't mean you should call it a privilege, just as you wouldn't call freedom a privilege because an innocent man was jailed.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Who-determined-that-driving-is-a-privi...
There are people who think in very different terms, where the primary goal is protecting a moral norm they have in mind, and the focus (possibly even "obsession") is going to be doing that by exacting a punishment as a disincentive and example. Taking away a privilege is an obvious choice. Whether it's related is unimportant; what's important is whether it hurts. If the cascading effects are considered at all to someone who thinks like this (and I want to stress here that involves a level of analysis that may be second nature for you but is quite likely actually a stretch for many of the people I'm talking about here) then those cascading effects may well be considered good: the fact of making a debt less likely to be repaid is secondary to making it harder for the subject deserving of the punishment. The pain is the point.
Now, you might respond "is there evidence that this kind of punitive approach actually leads to overall better outcomes?" And that's a very good question, but again, it's the kind of question someone who cautiously approaches the question of punishment with considerations of counterproductivity in mind would ask.
But that's just me.
But I think it's probably a values/temperament issue, which isn't necessarily an intelligence issue, and might need different solutions.
In a country that values punishment over any empirical improved outcomes, I wouldn’t hold my breath for people to care that taking a driver’s license away for unpaid support will end up hurting the children involved, or society as a whole.
Sure, not meeting your responsibilities has to be dealt with and have consequences, but the consequences shouldn't have to be catastrophic and put you into an unrecoverable situation to act as a deterrent.
But say, if he hadn't been sent to prison, would he have paid child support then?
We all don't know, but I strongly suspect no, and I strongly suspect the court has more than just my suspicions and calibrated its reaction accordingly.
The amount could have been ordered to be taken from his bank account, or confiscated from his salary directly from his employer or payment system, or taken from his property.
There's absolutely nothing that necessitates that he is sent to prison if he merely can't pay.
Only if he has money and doesn't pay (and that after accounting for his food and rent expenses at a nominal minimal fee), or hides money that he could have used to pay.
In a country made for a car drivers it seems like a kind of an essential privilege.
It would probably be better if the phrase were "a grant not a right" or "a license not a right", but I guess that's not as catchy.
Plus it's more expensive for the government, causes more pollution, generates more danger, and hurts people's health. Not a lot of upside there.
I don't think I agree with the "most" in that statement, at least in combination with "barely an issue".
Admittedly I'm far from an expert in this, but I live in Germany now, have visited a bunch of countries in Europe, plus Japan, and that's certainly the impression I get. Right now our family of 3 living in a sleepy part of Munich gets by fine without a car, and we've visited lots of little suburbs and towns in Germany that are still highly walkable/bikable, with decent transit connections.
Not that having a car wouldn't be a big convenience bonus for us sometimes, but it doesn't feel critical at all.
Commute wise they are all part of same region while legally they are different cities. I don't think that's extremely uncommon arrangement in some larger cities in Europe.
Plus, who said people in the developed countries don't commute, or that even if they have public transport, having to and waste extra hour or hours in many cases (to wait at stops and to change buses or subway lines, etc), is small matter in the extra effort, free time, and health impact on the person doing it compared to being able to just drive there?
Not everybody in Europe lives in Amsterdam or some such city, nicely close to walking distance or a single public transit line to work.
Don't do the thing that gets your license revoked? And if it happens, get a different job?
> Plus, who said people in the developed countries don't commute, or that even if they have public transport, having to and waste extra hour or hours in many cases (to wait at stops and to change buses or subway lines, etc), is small matter in the extra effort, free time, and health impact on the person doing it compared to being able to just drive there?
Well, if it's just convenience, then that seems to fit the definition of privilege, no?
> Not everybody in Europe lives in Amsterdam or some such city, nicely close to walking distance or a single public transit line to work.
This is a ridiculous strawman. You don't need to live in a major world city to have effective non-driving commute options around.
There are some comments that make me think "I want to see all these things happen to that person, to see how casually they'll dismiss the problem then, and if they'll ever figure out what empathy means".
Really makes you wish those people losing their car and their job, because they fell behind on some student debt payment, and being unable to rise out of it. Add perhaps a few problems real people in those situations (which for them are dismissed as mere "personal failings) have, like spouses or parents or kids to take care of, some personal sickness, and so on. Maybe experiencing real life will help do with the smugness?
>Well, if it's just convenience, then that seems to fit the definition of privilege, no?
Being able to laugh away the pain of people in such situations (because you never were close to that, or have safety nets all around) fits the definition of privilege better.
That's just a BS saying, not some rule of nature.
Societies should define what is a privilege and what is a right.
Do you think if there was a referendum on this specific matter (and not tied to 200 other policy questions, like general elections are), people would vote that "yeah, indeed driving is a privilege"?
That's a hard no. I see where you're going with this, and we likely agree on 90% of this topic anyway, but the issue with society defining rights is that you end up letting the mob decide the "right" of green eyed people to live has just become a privilege.
Rights stem from nature, and exist with, or without society. If a society wants to add to the list, they're more than welcome to do so. Those are usually called privileges and its up to the society to attach proper protections to them.
That's what those in power try to sell, who think they know better, and that the people are savage animals that need to be kept in place.
In reality, the worse atrocities have been performed not by mobs, or at least not by mobs on their own, but by well educated, powerful people. All those gentlemen slave owners in the South, all those smooth talking Nazi higher ups (with support from Germanys financial elites), the higher echelons of USSR Party power, colonial gentlemen, and so on. Mobs have nothing on them.
>Rights stem from nature, and exist with, or without society.
There are no rights in nature -- something anyone who ventures outside of society (in a jungle, in the woods, etc) will very soon find out. Nobody in nature (outside of a human community) will ever protect their live to live, property, or anything else.
Rights are a social contract, made because man is a conscious, social, animal. The problem is that the contract is more often than not, presented like Terms of Use, already written from those in power.
I think it's more accurate to say that rights (in the original setting) are a list of things that the law cannot prohibit you.
Or explain what it would mean for rights to exist outside of a society?
It seems you're only considering legal rights, possibly because natural rights are difficult to justify from a secular perspective.
The thought experiment I'd run is, just like the one of science vs religion: start from scratch, look for the rights that every society has in common.
Property? Nope. Freedom of speech, association, whatever? Nope. The one I think might be universal would be the right to marry someone; I can't think of ever reading about a society where the right to marry and start a family was not a part of it. (Which we also don't really recognize as an explicit right anywhere in modern society, do we?)
That the concept is... not trivial to defend, in these our modern times, and further that it may not have much practical use beyond its value in propaganda (which is real and shouldn't be dismissed and, I suppose, is furthered by the sort of education above) isn't really covered.
The only thing keeping then "unalienated" is actual people, with guns and jails, etc, to prevent others from alienating them.
And even so, those people keep unalienated whatever they're ordered to keep by those who pay their salaries. In practice those rights have been alienated time and again, whenever those wanted it.
That isn't to say I don't think certain rights should be held as universal, or that some aren't worth dying for, I certainly do.
I just think there isn't a facet of human society that is not, in fact, ultimately a human invention (within the constraints of the pressures evolution has wired into our brains, like proscriptions on incest.)
And, frankly, we should all be proud of what we can build, as a species.
I guess we're not applying the tenth amendment here? As in, we have rights not explicitly enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
Poor people deal with obstacles that people with means never even think about. For example, Florida just voted to restore voting rights to felons and now the state legislature is attempting to change the will of the voting public to state that only felons that have all court costs and fines paid can vote.
Public defenders are another example, if you are poor and charged with a crime your defense is worth ~30 minutes of a low paid attorney's time which results in higher fines and/or jail time and the cycle continues.
This is America. So the answer is almost certainly: "Yes, you need your car to reach work."
rephrasing:
95% of Americans take private transit to get to work. I would call that an almost certainty that you need a car.
5% is huge.
How much of the country is that, again?
What's that ratio in the places where it isn't?
But what if you don't have auto debt? That logic doesn't work if someone bought a car they could afford.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/01/03/the-nu...
I dunno, having an owned-outright used beater seemed normal among my peer group when I was in/just out of college; having newer, better (relative to contemporaries) vehicles with financing is more common now that we're very well into careers. You can get a student loan with no credit history at pretty much the same terms as everyone else, but that is decidedly not he case for auto loans.
That said, this will move the needle for almost 50% of that population. Student debt is already non-dischargeable, and delinquencies are hitting record highs every quarter. Creditors are just trying to collect any way they can.
There's a lot of factors at work: the cost of education is insane, student loans are very easy to get, there is a ton of pressure to go to college, it's hard to think long term when you're 18, financial literacy is poor through high school, etc.
This is article is a good (albeit small) overview of the size of the issue: https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/13/us-debt-rate-auto-...
EDIT: I'm somewhat heartened to see some movement against this practice: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2019/03/04/student-...
I can't find anything on this. I can find 22 states that can suspend some kind of state issued license if you fall behind on your student loan debt, but only 2 that say they can suspend your driver's license, and apparently those 2 don't really do it very often.
I think you misread an article talking about professional licenses.
How are those two connected?!
And what if you need to have a car to ...keep a job and pay your debt (seeing that many cities are built for cars, and not everyone has the luxury to live close to work, or even have a basic public transport).
Might as well suspend your license if you owe money to the mafia.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/business/student-loans-li... - insane.
Unfortunately, much of the US is car dependent, so taking away someone's license is net counterproductive because one's income typically would decrease beyond the savings without their car.
In many areas, cities are cutting bus service to poor areas. The city I used to live in removed all but one route which left stranded or made transportation very difficult for a lot of people. The city I live in now simply cancelled their entire bus program.
The war on poverty doesn't mean what a lot of administrators think it means.
I agree, which is why I said taking away someone's license is net counterproductive.
Also, I'm not suggesting that people should become cyclists, just that driving is expensive.
Ultimately, these are just bandaids for low-density areas, greater density is needed to make the US livable without long distance commuting.
The main problem for commuting efficiency is housing and barrier of entry for getting a job close to where I live or vice versa.
It might help distance, but it usually doesn't do much to help time.
https://daliaresearch.com/the-countries-with-the-longest-and...
But in any case, it doesn't seem to contradict anything that I said.
I just tend to get a bit suspicious when problems are described as being particular to the US or worse in the US than in other places. I find that in many cases that is just not true. So I tend to poke around and see what I can see.
It's always cringy when bike activists just assume that everybody can get to work on a bike fast and without sweating.
Yes, if they started now, many could do that in a few months.
But the whole discussion tends to veer into fat shaming real quick.
> It's always cringy when bike activists just assume that everybody can get to work on a bike fast and without sweating.
My experience is that people tend to have an inaccurate view of what bike activists believe. I think few would say that most people can switch to cycling without major issues.
As for sweating, my experience is that cyclists tend to argue that some sweating is acceptable, not that people won't sweat. I can recall some people discussing how to reduce how much you sweat to a minimum, but I can't recall anyone claiming that you won't sweat at all.
> But the whole discussion tends to veer into fat shaming real quick.
Having participated in and observed many conversations about cycling, I can't recall that happening once. Can you point out an example?
With that said I would prefer if the municipalities were more bike friendly in the first place. I like driving, but I was certainly happiest when I lived in a different town and could bike to work.
Also, I know an engineer who works on diesel engines in Detroit and commutes by bike. He seems to think Detroit is pretty good for cycling, actually, contrary to what I expected. Don't know about metro Detroit, though.
I'd love it if there as a pan-Southeast-Michigan light rail to happen, but doesn't seem realistic with all the other infrastructure issues Michigan is having right now. Best we can hope for right now is that Q line gets extended out from downtown Detroit up to Royal Oak or Birmingham, but even that is a whole can of worms that Dan Gilbert would have to push for for there to be a chance at it.
Reread my post, as I don't think you're responding to what I wrote. I don't advocate taking away someone's license because of debts, which I believe I made clear in the last paragraph.
I don't know what you mean by "Please don't ruin people's lives with your ideas" if you were not referring to taking away someone's license because of debt. As I stated, I don't believe someone should lose their drivers' license because of debt.
What is the idea I have that would ruin peoples' lives?
I'm probably not alone in reading it that way, and I'd say many of us would be offended.
Maybe somethings could help sometimes and are net counterproductive other times.
Maybe some ideas could help in one aspect but are net counterproductive when considered as a whole.
I didn't read a contradiction in the parent post.
Obviously, I need to point out that in many ways we're not like China, and plenty of people who get fired, commit crimes, lose their drivers licenses, default on debt, ect. live happy and prosperous lives.
Also, how does the DMV know what someone’s debt history is?
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/Feds-take-o...
I also want the government out of the educational loan business and think that some of the financial risk should be borne by the educational institutions.
Making educational loans dischargeable in bankruptcy sounds reasonable on the surface but it problematic when you consider that a newly minted college graduate basically has no assets. Allowing the loan to be dischargeable would encourage graduates to immediately declare bankruptcy to get rid of their student loans. Not sure what the solution is there other than not making the risky loan in the first place.
Also the Federal government used to guarantee the debt. Now they finance it directly. They were always the ones on the hook.
You don't end up on the list for simply owing money (and it has nothing to do with social mis/conduct), you end up on the list for being sued over the money you owe, and the court determining that you do have to pay and that you have the ability to pay based on your personal financials (or if you refuse to disclose your personal financials to the court), and you still refuse to pay. Hence why its maintained by the court system.
The word "Lao Lai" that is quoted to describe them in the article is literally "long term renege".
You mean like the summary judgments that can be leveled against debtors in the US by debt collection agencies...
And which...ding your credit score. Which makes it harder to get credit...secure a loan...(sometimes) get housing...(sometimes) get a job
Versus...institutional segregation and denial of services by the government. Definitely not even in the same ballpark and definitely an artifact of the "social credit system" as described by the authors of this article in other comments here as being an accumulated set of practices and programs in China - no single thing.
The social credit score system is an actual scoring system based on your overall social activities, including both financial and non-financial (e.g. the rightfully dreaded political/religious activity). No nobody knows exactly how it works and no one I know in China actually knows their score or anything even qualitative about their score.
The discredited list is just a yes or no list based on court judgement for your financial debt, nothing more and nothing less. It is a public list and there is a clear way to end up on it.
And a podcast featuring a scholar who's closely followed the development of the system, and whom we interviewed for the article above: https://chinalawandpolicy.com/2018/11/12/whats-the-t-on-chin...
To give you a few examples - [1][2] are news articles discussing the exact same "laolai" list almost 10 years ago.
[1] https://finance.qq.com/a/20101214/004357.htm
[2] http://news.ifeng.com/mainland/detail_2010_10/20/2846252_0.s...
Would not have made this remark about an ordinary commenter but I would expect better from an editor.
The system is claimed to be backed by big data, and sure you can say there is no numerical score but come on.
The video discussed below goes into this in detail, discussing what does exist, what experiments there are, and where the researcher thinks China is heading.
All Fractional reserve lending systems replace capital with debt in the form of checks; A Loan made from a cash deposit comes back to the bank as collaterol on that debt, and as a new deposit which can create a new debt. The bank expects to be solvent because it can sell the loan to another bank to raise cash to cover the deposit, but in reality, what ends up happening is the ratio of cash to checks grows rapidly driving inflation. Inflation drives interest rates upward since nobody loans at less the rate of inflation. Interest rates, and the banks propensity not to spend more than they take in from interest, locks society into a game of musical chairs for repayment.
This is a politically unstable situation for bankers because nobody likes the idea of forcing honest people into bankruptcy and stealing their property, except perhaps a few very greedy and shortsighted bankers and politicians at the top of the heirarchy. This produces all sorts of laws and regulations, aka "compromises" which allow the ratio to continue to grow, and at some point the velocity of capital is insufficient to service the interest on existing debts at which point we begin forcing risk into places within the economic system it does not belong. We stopped publishing M.3 when it was at around 56 trillion, that is a ratio of around 56:1. M2 to M0 and M1 to M0 are two other ratio's to watch.
Ergo, we have not deflated the US housing market since 2007, and continue to drive prices to unaffordable levels. Assuming one has the cash to purchase a house, one must now contend with the risk of an impared title and a bankrupt title insurance company. Jobs can't pay living wages because businesses are saddled with business debts, and Governments don't enforce their laws because they too are bankrupt. The stock market is over-inflated from hedge funds and HFT games. List goes on.
Eventually you end up reducing the number of checks in the system forcefully through bankruptcy, such as through an economic crash, or you destroy price signalling mechanisms within the economy which leads to an economic collapse. A good measure of a collapse is fertility rates, birth rates and average life expectancy. When the USSR Fell, their fertility rate was down to 1.2 births per women; the US currently sits at 1.72. 2.1 births per women is replacement. Birth rates are falling because women are having kids later in life, and live expectancy is dropping due to an increased suicide rate. These rates tend to drop suddenly once society becomes too far taxed by the way, as the USSR's statistics shows.
Our discussion about $15 an hour minimum wages is very much so a discussion about forcing rich people into bankruptcy so the average working Joe can have basics in life and society can be stable. We can make correlations to history, but at the end of the day, there's a lack of concrete data to proove out the above pattern of behaivour and the people running the economic system, including doctorretes in economics, don't fully understand these mechanisms.
What China has managed to do here is create a class of permanent underdogs for whom the game is rigged and force them to literally compete against the rich for life and liberty. Literally the rich are eating people alive. This is an unstable, shortsighted arrangement; the chinese do not have a good grasp of how technology impacts society and are not interested in learning about how its has impacted other countries. They risk creating a powderkeg of permanent underdogs and a business culture of not making investments due to the risk or not engaging with the government due to the regulations. All of that will challenge their ability to remain stable and is likely to result in an eventual collapse.
The social credit score in China is far more invasive and penalizes you for associating yourself with individuals who have low scores.
To compare the two is disingenuous and reaks of whataboutism
Your comment would be just fine without the last sentence.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
This isn't the same social credit that is mentioned in this article. What you're describing is a speculated feature of a social credit system that doesn't even exist yet.
Which would you prefer? Be thrown in jail; or be limited some freedoms/privileges?
I'll take limited freedom. Maybe, then, I'll have a simple chance to prove my case. From Wikipedia, 21% of prisoners in the US are unsentenced. That's roughly 400,000 persons.
It's as crazy to think that close to a half million people are sitting behind bar with no sentence and probably no resources to fight back.
Yes, China is bad. But I think it is doing better than the US given the resources it has and the population challenges.
Criticizing evil does not implicitly mean you endorse your own localized evil. The rampant systemic and structural racism and classism built into American society is heinous, but all I can realistically do about it from my vantage point of poor 20 something living in rural PA is vote and advocate for politicians I put my trust in to right the wrongs.
Tell that to the between 1 and 3 million people who are in Chinese concentration camps because of their religion.
>From Wikipedia, 21% of prisoners in the US are unsentenced.
I'm not sure about the number you came up with, but those are people are awaiting trial, and there are constitutional limitations on how long they can be held. There are no such safeguards in China.
The US is toying with going in that direction.
https://money.cnn.com/2013/08/26/technology/social/facebook-...
> One such company, Lenddo, determines if you're friends on Facebook (FB) with someone who was late paying back a loan to Lenddo. If so, that's bad news for you. It's even worse news if the delinquent friend is someone you frequently interact with.
Fully expect to see this sort of thing incorporated in credit scores barring legislation to restrict it. We've got even less ability as individuals to stop Equifax from doing this sort of stuff than we would versus a government.
I fully expect to see an enterprising lawyer bringing a class action suit and taking the money of the companies who invested in this one
As a US citizen, I don't believe that pointing out my own faults is "whataboutism". It is self-criticism. "Whataboutism" is a defense. I am not defending China, what they are doing is awful, and we should work to make sure that the systems that we have in our country don't replicate it whatsoever.
Basically, I am taking "Appeal to Hypocrisy" and flipping it on its head. For the most part, I do not have the ability, power, or vote to alter the course of Chinese politics. However, most people on here have the opportunity to do so in the US.
Yes, but the fix for this problem is not to stop allowing people to consider a past felony conviction when determining what sort of business to do with a person. The fix for this problem is to stop criminalizing things that shouldn't be criminalized, like non-violent possession or use of drugs.
Nor do Chinese citizens.
Good on you for fighting the good fight, I've abandoned all hope: I'll let our societies figure out where this winding path goes itself and hedge accordingly…
Social network-influenced credit scores are becoming common internationally, including by US lenders, but do not appear to be used yet by the major credit reporting agencies in the US due to uncertainty over status under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (just a few of many articles):
https://www.badcredit.org/consequences-using-social-network-...
https://www.creditinfocenter.com/creditreports/scoring/socia...
https://qz.com/1276781/algorithms-are-making-the-same-mistak...
What about all those high school friends we still have on Facebook who never did anything with their lives?
Citation Needed. As far as I know that's a possible, but still speculated feature.
You can think of China's currently state of totalitarianism as a metastasis of what started in the US.
Basically, if social network analysis helps creditors, then it will be done unless the state or some external force provides sufficient counter-incentive.
This is awful. Totally admit it, they shouldn't do it, etc.
About the same as being a released felon in the United States. We also allow financial information to be pulled for background checks in the United States:
> A check of a candidate’s background may include employment, education, criminal records, credit history, motor vehicle and license record checks.
From https://www.hireright.com/background-check-faq/answers/what-...
We already have what is functionally a social credit system in the United States, you'll find the people suffering under it getting harassed by ICE boarding greyhound buses.
In the US, the credit rating system is a creature of, and controlled by, the market. The US imposes very weak regulation on the credit ratings companies for individuals, and almost none at all on the credit ratings companies for businesses.
Neither one is really optional, so does it matter?
In some ways US credit system seems worse for me. The only way to get into it is to get a credit. But what if I do not like to pay interest rates? If I'm higly conscious and I can put down my impulses to buy things, to consume for the sake of consumption, to live on pennies while building a capital from scratch? It wouldn't work, because of this system. There are no way to demonstrate your credit reliability and trustworthiness to a system except paying interest rates. At the same time in China a person has non-financial ways to build up her social score. There are a bad sides, of course, like brutal punishments to those, who've hit negative scores, and it completely makes China's system unattractive for me, comparing with the US one.
Seems that China's system is less tolerant for a risky behaviour, while US system just put you on rails of debt and gives you no other way. The latter seems less disgusting for me, but I'm glad that I have not to deal with any. And as outsider for both I really see no big decisive difference between them, they seem for me very similar.
Here's a quick overview of how a US credit score is calculated - https://www.equifax.com/personal/education/credit/score/how-...
How it works? What the reason for a bank to give credit without interest? I just do not believe it. System must have a way to get interest. If system says it charges no interest, it means that interest payments are hidden. Either behind transactions fees, or by fixed costs covering maintanance of credit card, or by some other ways.
You're correct, US credit card companies do still make a profit on those of us who pay off their balance in full every month and therefore pay no interest.[1]
Visa/MC/Discover/Amex all charge the merchants a percentage (~2%) to process a credit card transaction. I have a cashback card with no annual service fee which pays 1.5% cashback.
Let's say I spend $10,000.00 on this card in 1 year. Visa will collect $200.00 in merchant fees, pay me $150.00 in cashback, and gross profit of $50.00 on my account for 1 year.
Some cards charge an annual service fee which adds to the gross profit.
[1] It's possible there are some people who are a net loss to the card issuers due to gaming the rewards systems, but generally the issuer will make money on someone who pays $0 in interest.
In a sense you are right -- there is a hidden fee, and it's related to the value that credit cards create for merchants. There are other ways to make money on payments, besides interest. The card company charges the merchant a fee -- perhaps 3.5% -- to process the transaction.
If a customers pays 8.00 USD for a toothbrush with cash, the merchant receives 8.00 USD in cash. If the customer pays with a credit card, the merchant receives 7.72 USD directly in their bank account. They lose 0.28 USD on 8.00 USD. Why do they take this deal?
* Reduced risk of theft and loss. Cash is easy to steal -- it can be stolen by employees, by dedicated robbers, and by passers by.
* Increased likelihood of making a sale. People don't want to carry too much cash, so sometimes they run out; and instead of making an impulse purchase, they just don't make the purchase. Credit makes it much easier for them to make that purchase.
As a Taiwanese, I don't know how the system works, nor can I feel the same as what Chinese citizens under that surveillance feel. However I can certainly say that, there must be an another part of the system that monitors "political activists" against CCP. Let's call this part as X below.
Once you are in the blacklist of X due to reasons like criticizing Chinese government, you loses some rights implicitly, and the worst part is that X applies even if you are not a Chinese citizen. I have two examples here:
1. Taiwanese rights advocate Lee Ming-che held in China
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-39428220
Lee has been in prison since 29 March 2017, because he "ruined Nation Security." He was retained for months before he had a trial.
2. [Documentary] Self-censorship by Kevin H.J. Lee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpHFVZX2TuA
He criticized CCP and then he could not obtain a visa to even Hong Kong. In this documentary, many instances of such censorship are mentioned, and you can see how the atmosphere is under such surveillance.
you lost me there.
> In China, only those who cannot afford the high-speed train take the slow train.
I have taken a similar train from Shanghai to Shenyang, it was also a bit north of 30 hours. Sure, it was not very clean and as everywhere you may encounter unconventional people but in general it's not at all the deadbeat caravan they paint it out to be.
Of course most businessmen would almost always take the high-speed option, but that is the case in Europe too. I did meet and talk to a man who owned a factory on the train, though, and I get the impression that middle-class people and students will still take it for trips in their free-time. Not necessarily because they can't afford other options and I think it's just untrue that "only those who cannot afford the high-speed train take the slow train". If that had been a quote by the subject, that is one thing, but here it's stated as fact.
Don't you think there's more to the story than that his associates deduced his laolai status just by which train he came by?
I hold some small hope that despite their lack of empathy, regimes will at least see the practical side of how ineffective this kind of policy is and how much it inevitably will hurt their economy, after trying it out for a while. Hopefully that lesson will be learned while it's still mostly contained to China.
One thing I think many people overlook in China's social credit system is its stated goal – to create a system that rewards good behavior and punishes bad behavior – and whether this system can really tackle self-destructive behavior you describe, like debt.
And what's going to happen to people who're entering a debt spiral, and are as a result further punished by the system? Does the idea of social credit mean these people are simply abandoned?
please stop spreading false info. people on that "laolai" list are those who intentionally refuse to pay their debt when they have the resources to do so. as also explicitly mentioned in your own article, they are punished to the extent of being inconvenience to do certain things, e.g. in your described case, they can still ride a train just not the high speed one.
Having resources and having resources to spare for paying creditors are two different things. You can't hope to pay off your debt long-term if you don't buy food in the meantime. That's an extreme example, but the same principle applies to clothes for interviews, transportation to business opportunities, and, yes, possibly high-speed rail travel. An individual can't pour every yuan they get into paying off debt, or they'll end up in poverty (or worse) and their debt will have no chance of ever getting paid. Everybody loses in that scenario.
With 1.4 billion people, surely you can dig up some "opposite effect", but again - how about look at the vast majority of those real victims here? When someone owes you money and the court order says they should pay you back, yet they choose to completely ignore that. It is just shockingly unbelievable that you choose to defend such offenders because they now can't ride high speed rail!
From what I saw/met, most of those debts happened between average individuals. That is how the list end up having millions of cases.
I randomly checked a few cases on that list, most of time, the amount of debts are a few thousand USD. It is not some micro-loans for average guys on streets, it is close to one year of their wage.
In China, banks are run by the government, yet there are shit ton of scams that borrows money from the party and never pays it back. In many cases the loan guarantor has no mortgage to payback at all.
In this "social credit" system from Supreme Court, 90% of the victims are worthless loan guarantors involved in some kind of loan scam.
Looks like the system is working.
If "barred from participation in the securities markets" by the SEC meant flying in coach and no landing slots for private aircraft, it might have more effect.
"owing" money means you borrow from secondary lender, using it to buy risky assets. you essentially played with fire and got burned. lots of cases like this where these "businessmen" loses money and then declared bankruptcy, refusing to pay anyone back.
sounds a lot like wallstreet doesn't it? are you okay with what they did?
this is government way saying enough is enough.
I'm sure the CCP would love to use social credit as another tool of repression, but for now they're having enough trouble getting a normal credit reporting system going.
1. If a lender lends me money, they're shouldering the risk that I may not repay the loan. That risk should be priced appropriately.
2. Bankruptcy is a valid concept.
3. What Wall Street did was misjudge the risk of their products (whether intentionally or not). Sounds like what the lenders in your example are doing.
But the government is punishing the risk-takers. Not sure that's a good way to promote entrepreneurship or innovation. The bankruptcy alone should serve as the deterrent (and signal to future lenders)
Here's a personal example, my parents bought a condo in China in a new development area, searched around for renovators and found this shop close by that seemed fairly legit. A show room, full staff, decent looking portfolio, sales people looked legit and they had legit looking supply chain relationship as well.
My parents worked out a project scope and plan, estimated the cost, put down 25% for down payment. The shop came in, did a month of work and then disappeared. Job was half done. what happened? They went "bankrupt".
Are the shop owners risk takers? Maybe. Did they really try to start a business? Honestly they probably saw an opportunity where a new development area was coming up and came in for the quick buck. Borrowed some money, set up shop to a decent level and then disappear.
This isn't an isolated case, lots of examples exist. Am I saying this is the case for everyone? No. But its gotten bad enough that the government had to do something about it. Is it my parents fault for not doing more due diligence? Probably. But it's really really tiresome if you had to do this every. single. time. for everything.
As far as I know, (and correct me if I'm wrong), China didn't have a credit score system as developed as what we're used to in the US (i.e. Equifax, TransUnion, etc.)
But what the social credit system represents is a leapfrog over that to something much more invasive and ubiquitous. I don't want to know if my contractor once smoked in a no-smoking area, of if they buy too many video games. But I do want to be able to check their contractor's license and make sure there aren't complaints.
Some of the pilot projects are intended to work more like that. For example, if you wanted to confirm that "Wenzhou Overseas Travel Ltd." is legit, you could check Wenzhou's portal and search for the name. https://wzcredit.gov.cn/creditSearch/getCompanyDetailInfo.ht...
Then you can see some basic information about the company (legal representative Chen Lili, services offered, address, registered capital of 10 million Yuan, founded in 1998...) and then a bunch of information that's supposed to help evaluate their creditworthiness or look them up in other systems. The section for negative information (underlined in orange) is empty. The most recent data is from 2017, though, so who knows whether the system is even updated anymore.
Either way, China faces a very unique situation, but I do see overall improvement in living condition. I don't live there full time but visit often, I'd say the biggest challenge coming up will be dealing with the aging population (and their needs), the shrinking work force, and decrease in consumer confidence. The post-boomer generation did VERY well for themselves but I can't say the same for the millennials and beyond.
You can be put on the list for all sorts of things...
“examples of infractions include bad driving, smoking in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games and posting fake news online.”
Getting put on the list is a punishment that can be ordered by a court for various infractions, but not buying video games, because (unlike the other three) it is merely frowned upon, but not illegal. Discouraging video games was part of one companies' private implementation of a "social credit system". The list is another "social credit system". Various local governments within China are also running their own pilots.
Those systems are not connected yet. It is expected that eventually the Chinese government will decide on one implementation by selecting parts of the pilot projects, but it isn't clear which parts. Until that happens, buying too many video games isn't going to ban you from taking high-speed rail.
And as horrible as I think the social credit system is, there's an interesting question, as people who don't live in China, what business it is of ours (except, perhaps, as a cautionary tale)?
This doesn't seem that easy - after all, most products in western super markets are made in China. Maybe people can stop traveling to China, but that wouldn't make a difference big enough for the Chinese ruling class to care.
But why restrict this question to China (though this particular article is about China)? Why not Saudi Arabia, for example?
as people who don't live in China, what business it is of ours
Because, if this works, other governments will follow, in no time and likely with Chinese government help. They will "learn" from Chinese government's "experience". Even if you didn't care about the plight of Chinese people, you'd surely care about your own countrymen's freedom? Tech surveillance is more dangerous than anything, because it is easier and cheaper to implement and it can scale, compared to any other system.
That is most definitely not the case, almost all of our groceries and soft goods (that supermarkets sell) come from domestic or nearby foreign sources. Perhaps you meant hypermarkets or discount department stores like Walmart?
Remember the US still has the largest surveillance apparatus in the world. All they would need to do to implement a social credit system is to flip a couple of switches.
It's widely known that american companies have this capability but don't really know the details...
China has millions of minorities in detention centers with some highly questionable things happening to those people. If you believe in justice and human rights, it is everyone's business what happens there.
In general we ought to try to change things we don’t like. I can’t imagine the people of China like this system do they?
Presumably a system that promotes good behavior is well liked by people who haven't run afoul of it. And of course, via censorship practices, a very small percentage of Chinese citizens are aware of a lot of reasons they should be concerned about their government.
Russian citizens are also wildly enthusiastic about Vladimir Putin. It's not a safe assumption that people living in countries with authoritarian leaders disapprove of them.
Also see Hitler's popular approval ratings [0] (Godwin's law notwithstanding). In August 1934, roughly 90% of German voters were in favor of the consolidation of the offices of President and Chancellor into a single Leader-Chancellor in the person of Adolf Hitler. Note that number should be taken with a big grain of salt, since there was tremendous social and political pressure to vote that way -- and a threat of repercussions for voting "no".
[0] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general...
> Presumably a system that promotes good behavior is well liked by people who haven't run afoul of it. And of course, via censorship practices, a very small percentage of Chinese citizens are aware of a lot of reasons they should be concerned about their government.
For that reason, I think it's important to take such public-opinion data with a grain of salt. You have to wait until people have enough direct contact with the system in question so they can form an informed opinion of it.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
If we allow this to become normal, we'll regret it.
If you are looking for inhumane behaviors upon which to base a boycott of China, there are several better choices.
They are both systems designed by the elites to shape the behavior of commoners.
Why do I have to regularly use a credit card to prove that I am credit worthy, so that I can get a bank loan to buy a house?
Whereas you taking a high speed train is not a risk, so blocking that is just punishment.
Also in America your credit score won't affect you from buying things like a plane ticket or even leaving the country. It only affects your line of credit (money borrowed). I'm not convinced the government should be telling you how to spend your money (but that's clearly an opinion).
There's also a lot (A LOT) wrong with the credit system, like the fact that a significant number of Americans (numbers vary from 5% to 25%) have significant errors by one of the 3 major credit agencies. Equifax... I'm not convinced China could do substantially better than us (especially when you add more factors). Even if you reduce that number to 1/1000 (I doubt that good considering other database error levels), that still seems like a big deal if it prevents you from mundane events like taking a train or plane. I wouldn't look at a system that doesn't look good and say "Hey, we should do this, but with more consequences when it fails."
It's like being 20 years old and creating a new startup then wondering why investors don't want to give you any money so you can hire out staff and build a product.
It's not inherently impossible to get a loan with no credit history, just really difficult to do without something else to inspire confidence.
And frankly, considering how easy it is for any Joe to build a decent credit history from just using credit cards I'd say most lenders are actually doing consumers a favor by lending them such vast amounts of money on such a basic premise. I know if it were my money I'd be way more conservative.
I have not heard of the expiration of offences in this system. This social credit system is new an may evolve with time.
Also, please don't use the tired trope of "whataboutism" on HN. It contains no information, and is a form of name-calling that breaks the site guidelines as well. More on that: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Your comment would be fine without that last sentence.
In the US getting a felony on your record is perhaps the biggest limiter to your future success that you can do. There are so many things stacked against you at that point. In California there is at least a process for getting some felonies expunged, which allows you to get back on to the playing field of life without that weight dragging you down.
The article seems to make the case that the only way the victim could get their status restored was to come up with money somehow to repay debts.
However, that joke really isn't true, because all the countries took it as a model, it's just that China seems to be somewhat proud of that fact, whereas the rest tried to do it covertly.
Technology is a multiplier. It can give us some irrelevant goods (basically, access to every article, news, movie, information without effort, in other words, without any real investment from us, or the ability to make some bureaucratic experience faster, while helping add tons of new bureaucratic requisites that weren't there before), but it mostly multiplies control, and thus dystopia.
If our system punished selfish people more, as a conscientious individual, I would be better off. I don't buy this bullshit that selfish people drive the engines of progress; they don't drive it; they just capture the proceeds of progress.
John D. Rockefeller himself admitted that "He who works all day, has no time to make money".
To claim that people who declare bankruptcy are selfish is quite a blanket statement and leads me to believe that you have never known poverty. Try being poor or even border line and breaking a leg or having a child get cancer. Try getting laid off for even a few weeks when over 40% of Americans cant even come up with $400 to cover an emergency.
The ringtone as a scarlet letter...
This line of thinking spans cultures and completely ignores the velocity or time value of money. It is extremely counterproductive and doesn't factor in what someone is trying to do.
This punitive approach to all forms of spending and consumption hampers the productivity of nations.
A simplistic analysis like this has no way to distinguish someone shirking their debts, and someone reinvesting in a future business prospect, or just unwinding! All humans want to unwind.
People with lower debt ratios do the same thing. They don't always pay things down, don't always prioritize debts in any particular order. So this privilege shouldn't disappear just because someone is visibly having money challenges or merely known to have a creditor.