Social Credit System
The Social Credit System (Chinese: 社会信用体系; pinyin: shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì) is a national credit rating and blacklist being developed by the government of China. The social credit initiative calls for the establishment of a record system so that businesses, individuals and government institutions can be tracked and evaluated for trustworthiness. There are multiple forms of the social credit system being experimented with, while the national regulatory method is based on whitelisting (termed redlisting in China) and blacklisting.
| Social Credit System | |||||||
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| Simplified Chinese | 社会信用体系 | ||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 社會信用體系 | ||||||
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| Nudge theory |
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The origin of the system can be traced back to the 1980s when the Chinese government attempted to develop a personal banking and financial credit rating system, especially for rural individuals and small businesses who lacked documented records. The program first emerged in the early 2000s, inspired by the credit scoring systems in other countries. The program initiated regional trials in 2009, before launching a national pilot with eight credit scoring firms in 2014.
The Social Credit System is an extension to the existing legal and financial credit rating system in China. Managed by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the People's Bank of China (PBOC) and Supreme People's Court (SPC), the system was intended to standardize the credit rating function and perform financial and social assessment for businesses, government institutions, individuals and non-government organizations. The Chinese government's stated aim is to enhance trust in society with the system and regulate businesses in areas such as food safety, intellectual property, and financial fraud.
China's Social Credit System has been implicated in a number of controversies. As of 2024, there is no single social credit system or score. Social credit remains a fragmented set of policies and systems which impact businesses more than individuals, including financial credit reporting, blacklists for judgment debtors based on specific court orders, sectoral blacklists and redlists addressing non-compliant and compliant companies and their owners, no-fly and no-ride lists based on specific instances of train or plane passenger misconduct, and voluntary local programs which can provide rewards based on individual scores but no penalties.