The Shocking Emergence of Social Credit in China

A new mobile payment system in China has taken the ideas behind credit scores to an extreme.

Alipay
A staff worker tests AlipayHK at a store in Hong Kong, south China, May 23, 2017. In recent years, a number of China's technological innovations have been making their moves in the world. (Xinhua/Qin Qing via Getty Images)
Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images

A stunning piece in Wired takes us inside the invention of social credit, a developing system in China that expands the conventions of credit ranking to every corner of citizens’ lives. As the Chinese government plans to unveil a social credit system that would rank “the reputation of individuals, businesses, and even government officials,” according to Wired, by 2020, Ant Financial’s mobile payment system Alipay has already established a similar system. Alipay’s Zhima Credit assigns each of its mobile payment users a three-digit score between 350 and 950, which considers everything from loan repayment to education level to the Zhima scores of the user’s friends. The user’s score has a tremendous impact on the service the user has access to throughout Ant Financial’s ubiquitous array of partnered companies. The extent to which Ant Financial and the Chinese government cooperate is unclear, but Zhima Credit’s blacklist contains 6 million people who defaulted on court fines at some point.

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