Towards a sophisticated system of social control. An exploratory study of China's Social Credit System

Abstract

The subject of the dissertation is the much discussed China's Social Credit System (SCS). This is a social management and social control project that will be officially implemented at national level by 2020 in China. This system involves a series of mechanisms that aim at evaluate citizens and business entities behaviour, not only in a legal way but also considering the morality of their actions. The aim of this work is first to give a general overview on the subject by analysing the social and cultural background where the system finds its legitimation, the surprising and at the same time disconcerting technological development China has gone through that allows the creation of such a system, and describing the official documents concerning the construction of the SCS. It must be said that a national legislation about this system is still not present, but different types of social credit systems have been developed across the country, so the work also analyses local regulations that have been already implemented in different Chinese provinces and cities and tries to give a clear explanation on the practical functioning of the system, in particular about the process of punishing and rewarding. Also, even though the project presents new and original means of social control, in particular from the technological point of view, and the system based on rewards and punishments is one of a kind, this thesis also stresses the fact that this is not a completely new way for the Communist Party to operate in the field of social control. In addition, this kind of big data technologies are also used in the West for different purposes – such as profiling for marketing uses – even if with different outcomes. The general idea is, then, the one of describing in general which processes brought to the possibility of construction of such a system, its practical applications and the consequences it may lead to after its implementation.