Seventeenth Annual
C of I   S T U D E N T   R E S E A R C H
C O N F E R E N C E
Saturday April 30, 2022
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Trust the Process: Evaluating China’s Social Credit Systems

AUTHOR: Christopher Truksa
FACULTY: Dr. Jeff Snyder-Reinke
DEPARTMENT:

ABSTRACT

This piece of research critically examines the nature of China’s social credit systems (SCS) and challenges the standard narrative of the system in the West. My alternative analysis is important to contribute to a more faithful dialogue about the SCS, which helps promote well-informed foreign policy and allows politicians and NGOs to prioritize the SCS more appropriately. This analysis was developed from a close examination of existing academic research, popular media, and translated Chinese government documents. China's SCSs are typically drastically mischaracterized by Western commentators as a form of digital totalitarianism central to the Chinese Communist Party's system of governance and control. The systems are often compared to the "Nosedive" episode of Black Mirror or Orwell's 1984. Rather, the SCSs are not an important tool of centralized control, and their punitive capacities tend to be quite mild. While the SCSs are typically presented as a single, homogenous, national system, they are actually a fragmented conglomeration of forty-three local government pilot systems and eight "private" systems, suggesting that the SCSs are not an important means of central control. In recent years the central government has taken steps to restrain some of the more punitive experiments that local governments tried in the administration of their local systems. They actually represent an attempt by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to build trust between individuals in society, and between society and the government. For many Chinese citizens, this system has been a welcome means of improving trust in Chinse society, which has been experiencing a crisis of trust. While the system does present legitimate concerns from its punitive nature to weaknesses in logistical operations, the systems are far from totalitarian.

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