Transcription
China's social credit system. Now, a lot of people either try to make excuses for it, or they try to talk about how bad it actually is. I'm here to tell you that it's probably not what you think, but it, in fact, is probably much worse than you think.
Everyone likes to make this comparison of China's social credit system to the episode of Black Mirror where the woman is basically in a dystopian future where everyone has this app and they're basically rated on their popularity, whether people like them, and they're rated out of five stars and they're segregated as such. So, for example, car rental companies won't rent to people below a certain score, people will judge you for being below a certain threshold, not invite you to events, companies might reject you from jobs. But anyway, all of this is based on the ability of everybody else being able to rate each other. So it's not really the same as China's social credit system, in that, in China, nobody is rating each other.
Another misconception I'd like to get out of the way first is comparing it to the credit system, the credit score system of the US. So think of things like FICO. Most of you are probably familiar with a financial credit score that rates your financial trustworthiness. It's intended to give creditors an indication of risk and how likely you are to pay your repay your loan commitments. However, outside of transactions, a bad credit score does not prevent you from seeing your family or enrolling your kids in public school.
In China, an individual's finances, social media activities, credit history, health records, online purchases, tax payments, legal matters, and people you associate with, in addition to images gathered from China's 200 million surveillance cameras and facial recognition software. By the way, do the math. That is one surveillance camera for every seven citizens.
So what I want to talk to you today about is how actually your social credit score is rated, what it means for you, how you gain and lose points, and how the kind of tier system, the caste system that they've created, actually affects people in China.
A huge shout out to Jordan Harbinger podcast. I was a recently a guest with Winston over on his his podcast, and it was super fun. And seriously, before the episode on me and Winston comes out on the podcast, before that's publicly released, go check out his other stuff because he's interviewed some of the most fascinating people I've ever seen, and I love his interview approach. And also, I've been binging all of his content. So I promise you, if you like my content, you'll definitely like his content. So go check it out.
So it's super interesting. I've, as you guys probably know, I lived in China for over 10 years. And the first place that China tried to roll this out, or at least test, was in in northern China, in in the province of Shandong, in this city called Rongchang. And Rongchang is actually a place I've spent a a bunch of time in. I've actually thoroughly researched the area, but I also filmed, uh, with my friend, an entire part of our documentary, "Conquering Northern China," in this area. And we filmed it right before they rolled out the social credit system. Thankfully, we've kept in contact with people from there, and we've been able to talk to them about how it's affected their lives.
Now, I got to preface this first by saying Rongchang, this area of of Shandong Province, it's always been a sweetheart like to the government. They got the sweetheart status in the government. When we were there, we rode our motorcycles throughout most of the this area of the province, and we saw it was used, it was being used to test out these wide boulevards, model farms, wind projects, uh, preserve tourist villages, very clean and organized fishing, fishing methods, and things like this. It was kind of mind-blowing to see this Disneyland-esque, almost North Korea-esque level of fakeness being put on because it was almost like this poster child of China was used for its propaganda purposes. The system was being rolled out through the country, but Rongchang is like fully documented.
And I actually found the Chinese documents used to build the social credit system. So no more about the Matrix and like looking at people with big data and like, oh, this person does this and blah, blah, blah, blah. I actually found the framework and the documents used by the Chinese government to to roll out the social credit system. So keep in mind, this is how the social credit system is being experimented with and then eventually how it was rolled out to other areas.
So this is in its purest form. The government basically divvied out a thousand points to its citizens, and they're kept by local Communist Party officials. This is their baseline. So you can either go above a thousand or you can go below a thousand. But basically, before we talk about what gives and takes away points, I want to tell you guys how their tier system works.
So it's very ironic that in China, a communist country, people are rated based on their credit worthiness, right? So they have this tier system, a caste system, basically, that puts people really high up or really low. The highest tier is called AAA, of course. That is the best. It is called "Model of Creditworthiness." If you have 1,050 points or higher, so this means you went above the baseline, you get some benefits, right? Right.
The second tier is called Double A, or "Exceptional Creditworthiness." This is basically the same the same benefits of AAA. There's no difference. But I'm feeling like if you were missing that extra A, if you're just a Double A, I would feel super subpar to my neighbor if he's a AAA. I'm only a Double A. But then I'd probably throw in like an excuse related to battery size to like make myself feel better.
Anyway, the next level is the A "Creditworthiness," and this one comes in three different flavors. You get A+, A, and A-. So this is when you're kind of hovering around, you know, what they divvied out in the beginning. These are your benefits. You get to be entered on a list to be used as a model in publicity. So you give the ability to the government to use you as a model citizen for publicity. Wow, awesome. You get priority in school enrollment and other social assistance. So this is scary. This is a few Chinese Chinese social programs that they actually have. You have to be an A to kind of get priority assistance for these things. And in school enrollment, supposed to be completely, uh, non-competitive in terms of what schools you go to outside of your grades. So now it's changing to that if you are not a good model citizen, your kids don't get to go to good schools, which is terrifying. You get preferential care and employment social assistance, and you get preference over equally qualified competitors in promotion or attention. So this is in jobs and work and things like this. And by the way, I'm not talking about some like secret speculation. These are the official documents that say this. You're, if you're an A, you're, you get treated as a better person.
Next is "Relatively Creditworthy." So that's when you've, you've dipped below a thousand, right? You're locked into it for two years. And what happens now is if you're in a B tier, you're probably going to get lectures and visits from people, uh, the government officials, and they're going to tell you how you can improve your score, right? But you're going to be locked in there in like probation for two years.
Now, when you drop down to a C, when you're at like 600 to 849 points, you're locked in there for three years before you can move up to a B. Even more visits from officials. They're going to be watching you, making sure you're on good behavior. They're going to be scrutinizing you in daily life. You're going to be on a list. Now, this list won't go to the full public with all of your information, address, age, what you did wrong, blah, blah, blah, but it will go to other government officials. So they said it will go to a limited audience.
When you drop to the lowest tier, and this is D, this is called "Not Creditworthy." It basically, it's like if you talk about the Indian caste system, it's the Untouchables. You're locked into Level D for five years, right? So this is when you're locked into D. You're talking about the officials are coming to visit you all the time. They can cancel any government funding that you have. So not just, not just, you know, temporarily suspend it, we're talking about canceling the government subsidies. You go on a blacklist, and this is public. All D's will go public. So, uh, publicly disclosing the information on their untrustworthiness. They can revoke all of your titles. So if you had a PhD or scientific discoveries, you'll, you'll have that, your erased, right? You can't get a loan, and you can actually lose your job over this. So if it's tied to what happened, like what you did to be untrustworthy according to the government, they can actually completely get rid of your qualifications and actually strip away your job. So you're locked into there for five years.
But what you have to understand is that there's all kinds of direct judgment factors. So the, the government, the Chinese government actually says if you commit an intentional crime, right, this brings you to the bottom of D. It's not like some sort of sliding scale here. If you went out there and did something bad on purpose, you just straight go down to D.
But let me make one thing super clear. If you are a political dissident or you speak out against the government, you're screwed. Either way, the Communist Party of China will just lock you up or disappear you. Okay? This is not a country with a rule of law. This is more of a system to coerce and influence future behavior and to standardize it for greater and ultimate control over the population.
So now that you know all these tiers, right, I actually wanted to break down and make it super easy on on some of the ways you can gain or lose them. Now, there's a thousand, there's like a thousand different ways you can gain or lose points, but I'll highlight some random ones. And what I want to do is take the average Joe, and I mean Z H U, and we're going to make two of them. We're going to make "How Joe" and we're going to make "Hao Joe." And "Hao" means good, and "Hao" means bad. And they're both going to start with a thousand points. And we're going to go through some of the things that they're going to do good and some of the things that they'll do bad with the same baseline to see where they end up.
If you overdraft on your credit card or your bank, minus 10 points. If you return lost money, we're talking 10,000 RMB or more, and this is probably returning lost money to the government. By the way, if they, if you just somehow come across it, that's not leading people to scams at all, that's plus 10 points.
If you use WeChat forums, blogs, or other internet technology, so just the internet, to publish and transmit negative information, that's minus 50. And that's just negative, that's negative information about the government. Uh, if you disseminate false speech, incitement, or cause trouble on WeChat groups, however, so not like person to person, that's minus 30. So sending a message literally on social media can knock you down minus 50. And if you do it in a WeChat group, that's minus 30.
If you report illegal conduct such as product, people participating in feudal superstition, so Chinese religions and things like that, unlawful construction, environmental pollution, or participation in cult organizations, that's a plus 10. So basically, if you're a rat, you get plus 10.
If you don't, if you don't accept the investigations from the officers that are trying to look into why you're breaking laws or breaking rules, or try you're losing social credit. If you don't allow them to come collect evidence on you, that's another minus 20 points.
If you are a part of a community, which everyone is in China, basically the community has like a Communist Party head. And if you go around and help them get information on all the people that are staying there, because keep in mind, you can't just randomly stay in a random place in China, you have to register. It's a very archaic system under Chairman Mao, it still exists. If you go around and get that information on who who's currently there and then report back to this Communist Party of China, you get plus three points.
Tax evasion, minus 100 points. Seriously though, the entire system of China is tax evasion and it's led by the tax officials. All right, that's just, that's just kind of how it works.
If you help the community resolve a major dispute between neighbors, plus 10 points. I think that takes some pressure off the cops.
If you go into the traffic stuff, if you get a like a fine between 500 and 2,000 RMB, which is really easy to do, especially if you go a lit, a tiny bit over the speed limit because of the speed cameras everywhere in China, that's a minus 10 points. But also, if you get a a parking ticket twice, that's minus 10 points as well.
If you set off firecrackers, dance in a square, like those old women that like to do that, you know, without properly applying for a permit, playing with a spinning top, I'm not joking, I'm quoting this, and using a high-pitched radio horn to produce noise, or raising animals that interfere with other, interfere with other people's lives, that's a minus five. And if you've been to China, you'd know why they might want to consider a like that.
Illegally holding classes, that's minus 50 points. So if you're teaching people anything really, it's minus 50. They don't want people to have underground meetings, basically. It needs to be in a CCP run or looked at school.
If you help, uh, the cops capture criminals or provide evidence, basically ratting them out, you get plus 20 points on that one. Surprise, surprise.
If you violate reproductive planning policies, meaning you break the two-child policy, in that you have three children, or you don't allow the government to sterilize you, which actually does happen in the government reproductive planning buildings throughout the countryside, that's minus 40. So if you have an extra kid, bye-bye social credit.
If you donate organs unpaid, so you're not getting paid for them, plus 100 points. And I'm assuming you have to donate organs of family members, because I'm pretty sure you probably shouldn't be donating organs of people you don't know or your own. If I guess if you're donating your own organs, you probably wouldn't be, you know, alive to have a social credit score, but whatever.
Unauthorized renovation of houses, minus five. But if you receive a national level reward, plus 100 points. So I wonder if my Presidential PE award counts from gym class.
If you make a tombstone that's too big, like it exceeds the area and height limits, minus 100 points. And that's crazy. No land is in short supply, but that's nuts.
If your kid joins the Army, plus five points.
Now, this one's interesting. In China, in the in the Constitution of China, you have the ability as a citizen to petition to Beijing directly to the government if you have a grievance and if it's not being resolved. Right? So petitioning to the government doesn't mean you can go out and protest. It means you can go file a petition letter. Now, what happens is if you submit a petition. So here in Shandong, we have Rongchang, which is like a small city, then Weihai, which is the bigger city of its area, right? And then you have Beijing, which is the capital of China. If you petition a complaint to Weihai, like the next up city, rather than petitioning to Rongchang, you get minus 10 points. So they're actively trying to stop people from petitioning to higher officials. If you petition to a provincial level, like straight up to Shandong, that's minus 20. And if you petition directly to Beijing, that's minus 50. So literally, if you have a problem that you need resolved and you need the government to help you with, if you go to Beijing to petition, you literally lose 50 social credit points, even though it's in the Constitution. Think about that for a second. They just literally want people's problems to be confined to their area so that they can micromanage and control them.
If your kid receives a, uh, recreational award or a sports award on a provincial level, you're, you're going to get a plus 20 credit social credit points. So you think about like Timmy wins state championships in his foot with his football team, your your social credit, uh, points just went up.
Another way to lose points is if you get criticism. So there's this thing called self-criticism in China. If you work in the party or you work even in a company, if you do something wrong or the boss thinks you did something wrong, you have to do a self-criticism. And a self-criticism is where you have to make a statement or say in front of everybody like why you are wrong. If you're ordered to have one of those, that's minus five. If you, if they circulate it, if they actually put it in the newspaper and they be like, this so-and-so is bad because of this reason. If you, if that happens in the city newspaper, minus 10. If it goes all the way up to, uh, to Weihai, like the the bigger city, if that gets circulated there, then that's minus 30. And I think you can see the trend here. This is kind of how Chinese media works. Is there's stages? It goes super local, higher, higher, higher, higher. And the higher up you go, the worse it is for your social credit score.
Now, if we look at these tallies here, you can kind of understand how this works nominally. So what it looks like to me is that the government really is using this social credit system as an as ultimate control, almost like a Jason Bourne, Minority Report system. That people will be too scared to do anything in the future and they'll know what to avoid. Because when I look at the crimes or the things that really take away points on the social credit system, there are things that are against the government, there are things that are speaking out against the government, there are things that are critical against the government. Less so things that actually should be changed within Chinese society. And that's kind of disappointing. The, the big focus here are your kids being good, are you being good, are you being loyal to the government? And that's, that's terrifying.
I see a lot of dictators around the world. If they were to read in the framework of this, would be salivating over this. It goes much further than just public shaming for jaywalkers, because China likes when the soft power comes out. There's, oh, look at this public, this jaywalker got publicly shamed, and everyone's like around the world, they're like applauding like, yeah, what a, what a dirtbag, can't believe you jaywalk like this. But the implications are much more than that. The shaming behavior is one thing. This is more than shaming bad behavior. This is shaming actual potential dissidents and people that want to speak out and have freedom. This is the end. I mean, there was no freedom to begin with, but this kind of starts to delete the gray area that made China what it was. Although the system has been officially in the work since 2014, what leadership could have come up with something like that, huh?
Unlike media portrayals of some app that you can check to see if someone is good or bad based on the government, the reality of what the social credit score really is is much more complicated, and it's much more sinister. At the same time, China's paid 50 Cent army, or the nationalist disinformation team, you might see trolling around comment sections. They want the rest of the world to think that it's either exactly the same as a FICO credit score or a handy tool to punish criminals. It's much bigger than that.
I hope you guys enjoyed that. If you did, please head over to patreon.com/la86. We have a really good community over there. You can send me personal messages, I post behind-the-scenes content. We have a really good thing going, and it really helps me to keep the channel going. And don't forget to check out, uh, my new channel, Worthless Whips. It's a car channel, but we started a new project on there where we've literally came across about 400 issues of Playboy magazine. And we sit down over some beers and look at all the car ads, cigarette ads, booze ads, the articles. We see how time has changed, and it's really, really, really amazing the kind of, uh, cultural transformation America's gone through over these years. So join us over there for a beer. It's super, super awesome. Thank you so much. Love winners, and I'll catch you on the next one.
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