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Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

@ 1:24 - You need good social credit to buy food!? holly fuck they are taking it up a notch.

... i'm half joking though, I have been to China many times, there is no way this is going to be effective for all of the cheap restaurants and street food. One thing I've learned about China, is although we often interpret their emerging laws and policies to be extreme (which they are) - what we don't appreciate is the context - they are not enforced as widely, rigorously and thoroughly as in the west. This is at least partly cultural and geographic, and it is probably this same reason that contributes to some of the Chinese government's overreach in the first place (to overcompensate). It does not excuse the human rights issues, but explains them somewhat.

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>they are not enforced ... widely, rigorously and thoroughly

That's a major source of the danger. If they were being consistently and equally enforced, then it would be obvious when there were issues. In the case with selective enforcement, the government can point to the law and say they're in the right, but only apply it when it suits them. This lets the people making the rules and the people who are in their good graces do what they'd like due to selective enforcement and not face the consequences of their actions.

Yes, like I said it does not excuse it, and for some laws especially those with severe punishment, it's a serious concern.

However in the case of certain types of policies it's not about intentional selectivity, it's about selectivity due to infeasibility, a type of selectivity that is not completely effective against any individual. For instance this one i'm pointing out: it's not possible to hold every single food source hostage in any country... but seriously, we are talking about food... in China... i'm running out of ellipses...

What that means, invariably, is that they will be enforced less against the politically connected and more on those without friends in high places.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Many of these enforcement mechanisms are highly network dependent.

People who are themselves less networked (e.g. less online, spending more time in rural areas or spaces with less cameras) are more likely to be overlooked by these enforcement mechanisms.

To understand this a bit better, consider how much more likely someone who owns a car is to receive traffic tickets from cameras than is than someone who does not.

Enforcement of laws is inversely proportional to your 關係 (guanxi).

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