In setting up the so-called Social Credit System, China plans to monitor, rate and regulate the behavior of citizens and companies with the help of big data, rewarding those who obey the rules and punishing those who cheat or don’t conform. “Social Credit is seen as a means of making people, companies, entire industrial sectors and the government more honest by monitoring behaviors,” says Shazeda Ahmed, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, and former Visiting Academic Fellow at MERICS.
The system’s digital mechanism will collect data on every single person in China by 2020. What motivates the government? What are the major challenges? And what do people in China think about this system?
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This podcast was first published by the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a YCW Partner. MERICS is one of the largest international think tanks for policy-oriented research on contemporary China.
