A brief prehistory of China’s social credit system

Abstract

This article situates China’s social credit system in a historical perspective by exploring its antecedents. The historical roots of the social credit system can be found in personnel archives for officials during imperial times, the Dang’an (personnel dossier) system under Communist rule, and the failed legislative proposal to establish “morality files” on Chinese citizens in the early 2010s. By recognizing their historical continuity and disjuncture, the article places the social credit system in its unique sociocultural contexts and provides alternative narratives to the current dominant state framing of the social credit system.

Introduction

In recent years, China’s social credit system (SCS)—a digital sociotechnical system that attempts to evaluate the trustworthiness of individuals, companies, social organizations, and state agencies in China with mechanisms of rewards and punishments (State Council, 2014)—has captured the imagination of technologists, policymakers, academics, and the general public alike. Often billed as an Orwellian nightmare that hovers in our not-so-distant dystopian future (Botsman, 2017), this new government intervention by the Chinese state conjures up deep-seated fears of a rising cyber power from Asia and expanding digital surveillance in the global society. While scholars and researchers have probed the SCS’ development trajectory (Creemers, 2018), surveillance potentials (Liang et al., 2018), policy implications (Chorzempa et al., 2018), reception by Chinese citizens (Kostka, 2019), resemblance with India’s Aadhaar project (Shahin & Zheng, 2020), and comparison with other ratings systems (Sithigh & Siems, 2019), no work to date has systematically connected the SCS to its historical antecedents. This article will provide a brief prehistory of the SCS in imperial, modern, and contemporary China.

Just as there was information before “information society,” data before “big data,” credit before “social credit,” the SCS has deep historical roots. They can be found in personnel archives for officials during imperial times, the Dang’an (personnel dossier) system started under Communist China’s rule that lasts till this day, and the more recent failed legislative proposal to establish “morality files” on Chinese citizens in the early 2010s. Discovering and recovering such historical roots means to both locate these vignettes from the past and recognize their historical continuity and disjuncture (Sewell, 2005). By tracing the SCS’ historical lineage, this account hopes to place the SCS in its unique cultural contexts, explore the temporal sequence of transformations, probe the influence of the historical antecedents upon our present understandings of the SCS, and provide alternative narratives to the current dominant state framing of the SCS.

The SCS

The first official mentioning of the term “social credit system” occurred in President Jiang Zemin’s annual report to the 16th Party Congress in 2002, stating China must “establish a social credit system compatible with a modern market economy” (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2002). The original intent for such a system was to assist state banks to evaluate the creditworthiness of individuals who applied for mortgages and enterprises that asked for loans. The “social credit system” as proposed then looked very similar to FICO scores in the United States or SCHUFA scores in Germany used to assess individuals’ financial creditworthiness. In the State Council’s 2007 Guiding Opinions Concerning the Construction of a Social Credit System, the Chinese government continued to emphasize financial creditworthiness.

The big change came in 2014 when the State Council ¹ (2014) expanded the concept of “social credit” from the financial realm to the social realm to include civil judgment, intellectual property, environmental protection, food and drug safety, and more. The 2014 social credit plan details division of labor in 12 main areas and 84 sub-areas (National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), 2014). In 2019, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), China’s highest Internet regulatory body, drafted a new law, extending “social credit” to cover online information and speech (Credit China, 2019). With the ever-expanding number of areas the SCS intends to cover, it has become “a cure-all solution” to China’s economic and social problems (Ohlberg et al., 2017, p. 2).

Despite the common Orwellian association, the SCS is not a unified national system that assigns a single numerical score to every individual or organization (Chorzempa et al., 2018), at least not yet. The state-driven, business-supported SCS should not be equated with its commercial look-alikes such as the Sesame Credit (operated by Ant Financial, an Alibaba subsidiary): the SCS is a state initiative aimed at strengthening state surveillance and governance with plans to evaluate not only individuals, but also businesses, social organizations, and state agencies; the latter is essentially a for-profit, financial credit scoring service with a royalty program providing privileges to users with high ratings (e.g., free bike rental or battery charging). In addition, the SCS includes far more punishment mechanisms such as banning trust-breakers from traveling by train or plane, purchasing real estate properties, or taking government agency jobs. While national efforts try to establish financial scoring for individuals and businesses through Bank of China, punishment mechanism based largely on court data, and rewards offered via Xinyi+ or 信易+ program (Liang et al., 2018), local SCS pilot programs such as Hangzhou’s “Qianjiang Points” do emulate private credit scoring schemes with incentives to encourage user adoption.

Imperial personnel archives

Although the SCS may seem to have bubbled into public consciousness from nowhere, bureaucratic file-keeping on officials and citizens has a long history in China. Li and Wang (1990) traced China’s personnel archival system all the way to Western Zhou Period (1045–771 BC). The authors located in the Book of Sui, the official history of Sui Dynasty, records of officials’ appointments and performances kept by designated file caretakers. More elaborate personnel archival system developed in Han Dynasty (202 BC–220 AD) recorded personal identification information such as name, age, birth place, education, occupation; superiors’ evaluations of officials; as well as rewards and punishments (Deng, 1989).

The height of ancient Chinese personnel archives, according to Luo and Cheng (2018), was the Jiaku System (甲库) developed during Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD). Known for its selection of talents for civil service, Tang Dynasty saw the growth of imperial civil exam system, and with it, the Jiaku System (Li & Wang, 1990). The imperial bureaucracy tasked officials to oversee the system and punish those who stole or destroyed records. Overall, Jiaku was critical to personnel management and state governance (Zhang, 2015). Subsequent dynasties—Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing—continued this practice with increasingly structured and detailed record keeping systems. During Qing Dynasty (1644–1912 AD), for instance, officials were evaluated in four aspects—morality, talents, diligence, and age—with grading scales for each (Li & Wang, 1990). During late Qing, personnel photos also became part of the officials’ archives.

Dang’an (personnel dossiers)

Following the footsteps of imperial personnel archives, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) developed a much more sophisticated Dang’an system for personnel management. Adopted first in the Mao era, the Dang’an system expanded the scope of personnel profiling and administration from government bureaucrats to average citizens. In her account of the practice of Dang’an system in contemporary China, Yang (2011) argues the system was managed quite unevenly, with more emphasis placed on urban, industrial sectors, and government cadres.

Like their imperial counterparts, these personnel dossiers record information about each data subject’s personal information, family background, job history, achievements, shortcomings, political activities, superior evaluations, and so on (Manion, 1985). They are secretly maintained by the state, governed by China’s National Archive Law (1987), and follow the data subjects throughout their careers. To Party cadres, these dossiers are crucial for their career advancement (Manion, 1985); to the average citizen, such files can inflict deep fear and uncertainty with the potential to ruin someone’s career. Dang’an thus illustrates the logic of “hauntology” (Derrida, 1994) that reigns over the data subjects’ bodies and psyche and haunts them through an invisible gaze. In this sense, Dang’an became the person as state politics sips into the most intimate aspects of a person’s life to maintain “the production and reproduction of state power” (Yang, 2011, p. 508).

Post-Mao China, especially since the mid-1990s, saw significant relaxation of the Dang’an system as an expanding market economy demanded more flexible labor (Sigley, 2004). “Talent centers” (rencai zhongxin) were created to handle non-governmental personnel dossiers so state employees, students, entrepreneurs, and migrant labors can move around more freely in search of jobs and opportunities. Overall, this shift in handling personnel files was necessitated by the transition from a socialist to a capitalist economy that required bureaucratic accommodation and a shift in administrative thinking that recast Chinese citizens as relatively free agents in China’s rising entrepreneurial capitalism (Yang, 2011).

“Morality files”

While the SCS’ connection to the Dang’an system (Creemers, 2018) appears obvious, a more recent antecedent to the SCS is the “morality files.” Started in 2011 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, “morality files” was an initiative by residents of Community 121 to record and publicize neighbors’ good deeds such as donations to sick neighbors to improve community relations. Later, the program expanded, and by 2006, nearly 50,000 residents in Wuhan’s Qingshan District had “citizen morality files” in a form of urban self-governance (Brady, 2006). In 2009, the “Moral Pujiang” program in Pujiang County, Zhejiang Province, incorporated “immoral deeds.” A “morality file” was opened on each of its adult resident (Chu, 2012) to combat many of the social problems identified by the SCS including gambling, drugs, unresponsive government agencies, and ineffective law enforcement. A steering committee and a team of “morality inspectors” recruited through exams doled out punishment and rewards. Ironically, the absence of “morality files” on the county’s top leaders incurred public criticism, a major reason leading to its eventual downfall.

Despite the failed attempts in Pujiang and other places, the idea of “morality files” was nevertheless proposed at the 2012 annual CCP meeting by Li Xiaolin, the daughter of former Chinese premier Li Peng. Her legislative proposal to “open a morality file on every citizen to regulate everyone and give everyone a ‘sense of shame’” (China Net, 2012) was met with a public opinion storm. Journalists, public intellectuals, and average netizens mocked the idea and raised many questions: Can citizens create “morality files” for Chinese leaders and government (Wang, 2012)? Can an immoral government be trusted to keep “morality files” on its citizens? Who determines morality? Who keeps the files and verifies information (Li, 2012)? What are the privacy implications of “morality files” when such files can be hacked like other online systems (Xue, 2012)? Can lawbreakers be regulated effectively by “morality files” while they chose to break the law in the first place? Such criticisms later quickly became subsumed under a much more centralized and authoritarian administration under President Xi Jinping’s leadership. The state became increasingly determined to re-assert and re-impose its authority over the lives of individuals as well as the operation of businesses and government agencies in an ever-more complex and changing Chinese society.

Conclusion

Our present is intricately linked to and embedded in our past. China’s long history of personnel management and file-keeping can both inform and (re)shape our current understandings of the SCS. Even though a national “social credit” scoring system does not presently exist in China, the potential for the state to collect unlimited amount of data for surveillance and social management raises deeply unsettling questions that have long existed before the SCS. From imperial personnel archives to Dang’an, the various dossier systems—both their artifacts and practices—are an essential technology of bureaucratic governance. The files and archives are “not merely instruments of social agents but active in the creation and maintenance of those agents” (Hull, 2003, p. 290). Some argue such dossiers constitute data subjects themselves through which the sovereign state exerts its power (Koopman, 2019). Like the Dang’an system, the SCS has the potential to become an instrument of uncertainty, fear, and psychic violence (Yang, 2011). Unlike the mystic personnel dossier system initiated under Mao, the SCS, as seen in some local pilots, often assumes a veneer of greater transparency by disclosing to the public a set of predetermined evaluative criteria. Data subjects in the SCS local pilots are also often assigned a composite score or score range with varied schemes of rewards and punishments to nudge subjects to behave in ways sanctioned by the state to achieve “gamified obedience” (Botsman, 2017).

Historical antecedents from imperial to contemporary periods also provide alternative narratives, viewpoints, and critique that are largely missing from the current dominant state framing of the SCS in China. Chinese official discourse now paints the SCS as a panacea to the country’s socioeconomic problems big and small from financial default to jaywalking with the professed goal to foster personal integrity, business credibility, and social trust (State Council, 2014). The deliberately vague and expansive scope aims to apply the SCS to all societal elements including individuals, businesses, and government agencies alike. However, if anything, the failed “morality files” experiments have clearly demonstrated the myriad philosophical, moral, and implementation problems for the SCS. Can a citizen’s morality somehow be summarized like a FICO or Sesame Credit score? How will state and local governments’ SCS schemes affect individuals’ life chances? What remedies exist for data breaches and privacy violations? Can the SCS succeed where laws have failed? How to hold those in power accountable? These questions and more raised for “morality files” apply to the SCS as a global public debates its emergent materiality. Before the SCS actualizes into more concrete forms, considerations of its long historical roots and antecedents could inform and reshape our current imaginings and discourses of digital governance in contemporary China and beyond.