NFT For A Cause (Part 1): Replicant Army Protects Your Personal Freedom

The social credit controversy in China is a threat to global freedom. This is the lifestyle that forces the society to live without personal boundaries. Without a boundary, the purpose of living disappears permanently.

Join The Freedom Army

Replicant Army is an authentic art for a cause. This is an artificial intelligence-produced that consists of 10,000 untracked and ultra-elite humanoids protecting your online identity against social credit system, digital identification and Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

Replicant Army protects you from social credit system. You are making a step forward to spread awareness about the effects of social credit system as long as your social media profiles stay as a replicant.

Facts & Statistics About Social Credit System

Trust is a problem in China long before the origin of social credit system in early 1990s. There were violence, murders and habitual distrust.

Through the initiative of China Communist Party (CCP) that began in 1921, China experimented with ways to live peacefully through a centralized governance. The blueprint for social credit system was drafted in 2007.

The term “credit score” that refers to a comparative estimate of a person’s creditworthiness is coined with “social credit,” which is a political philosophy of consumer purchasing power.

Combine social credit and credit score together and the term “social credit system” is born. This is an extended social system that integrates personal banking and financial credit rating.

Lydia Barrios is the author of a 2020 thesis that is entitled “Origins and Perceptions of the Chinese Social Credit System.”

In this study, the social credit system is defined as a system to monitor citizens, businesses and political organizations.

There are three goals of social credit system:

Number 1: To predict the trustworthiness among the citizens, businesses and political organizations.

Number 2: To reduce bias in the law system, especially in corruption.

Number 3: To facilitate the investigation for anti-corruption.

Surprisingly, 48.9% of citizens strongly approved of social credit system. Of all these respondents, 77% said they trust the local government with their personal data.

And, 59% openly admitted that they prefer the central government to manage the nationwide social credit system.

This means, majority of the citizens around China have no qualms when sharing an array of data to the government such as:

Traditional Input Data:

1. Income-tax records
2. Loan payments
3. Utility bills
4. Rent history

Social Input Data:

1. Academic integrity
2. Traffic violations
3. Criminal records
4. Family planning

Online Input Data:

1. Shopping habits
2. Online activities
3. Online interactions
4. Reliability of online information

Apart from those input data above, citizens must also submit their scores on travel options, hotels, school admissions, mortgage, insurance premiums and social services accessibility.

The social credit system is both public and private. Public system is mandatory. The government monitors and decides who is given a reward or punishment.

Punishment means you are either put in a redlist or blacklist. Baidu manages a website that publishes the names for each list.

Private system is voluntary. Commercial establishments provide benefits to all mobile users such as discounted bike rentals for senior citizens.

With 577.4 million customers who use mobile payment apps in 2019 alone, 80.04% participated in surveys conducted by commercial offices.

Tencent owns WeChat Pay, which has a total monthly active users of over 1.08 billion. AliPay is another popular e-payment system in China. It has over 900 million active users monthly.

Social Credit System: Real or Fiction?

Open forums about social credit system in China are endless. The extent of controversy and the extent of research are contrasting.

The Diplomat claims the first draft of a social credit law was approved for internal review in December 2020.

In South China Morning Post (SCMP), it says that year 2019 ended with 1.02 billion people being monitored, 2.56 million of which were restricted from flights and 90,000 were not allowed for rail travel.

Jeremy L. Daum is a senior fellow at Paul Tsai China Center. He participated in various forums and said the social credit system is highly misinterpreted.

His research reveals that social credit system targets corporate ratings than personal. Public education is a component of social credit system, which encourages people to trust each other.

Daum is one of the four panelists in Beyond The Black Mirror, an open forum conducted by Publica in 2019.

He shared to the audience that there is privacy in China. Privacy matters between citizens and between citizens and corporation.

Genia Kostka is a professor of Chinese Politics. The results of her survey were similar with the thesis above by Barrios.

She confirms 80% strongly approved of social credit system, most of which were rich and liberal. Same percentage signed up for a commercial credit system.

Respondents chose quality of life than privacy concerns.

There are news that say social credit system is coming to America due to the inefficient circulation of information about the vaccines against COVID-19.

Americans felt worried both public and private employers mandated the vaccines. Employees were fired once they disobey.

During the 2020 Presidential Election, major social media such as Facebook and Twitter disallowed contents about Hunter Biden.

A financial credit scoring existed in America, yes. It is unlikely similar with social credit system in China.

Mass Surveillance in China

Mass surveillance is one example of social credit system. The mainland China installed an estimate of 200 million CCTV cameras in 2019.

This mass surveillance system is called Skynet in 2005. The government installed about 200 million in 2018. One camera of the 200 million is enough to monitor seven people on the street.

The Guangdong province installed a total of 1.1 million in 2012, which cost 12.3 billion Yuan if the number of cameras went up to two million by 2015.

Chongqing is the most surveilled city in the world. Mass surveillance is a huge help for the citizens, especially to Li Hongmei.

Hongmei is a shopkeeper. The city surveillance failed to stop robbers. They still targeted her convenience store.

Six personal cameras were installed inside her shop and in less than a week, she caught the serial thief looting milk cartons.

A sacrifice in privacy is a sacrifice in democracy, this is one of the negative effects of mass surveillance on mental health. Hongmei believes the opposite, however.

“Chinese people don’t care about privacy. We want security. It’s still not enough cameras. We need more,”

She said in a 2019 interview with TIME Magazine.

There is also a strict implementation of digital identification in a mass surveillance system. Digital ID is accepted in over 15 major cities in China (SCMP, 2022).

The mass surveillance is a failure without the digital attributes of each citizen. These digital attributes are unique identity number, social security number, vaccination code, complete name, place of birth, date of birth, citizenship and biometrics.

ABI Research predicts 850 million citizens, inside and outside China, will have a mobile identity by 2026. Tencent and Alibaba Group made pilot trials in 2018.

Soon, there is an estimate of 6.4 billion smartphone subscriptions worldwide to a global population of 7.8 billion.

Pros & Cons of Digital ID

1. While the virtual identity is quickly and easily identified, there is a few information about what is collected and who is collecting.
2. Street criminals can no longer escaped. However, tracking people by geolocation means there is a 24/7 monitoring. The tracking device may only caught the wrong criminal.
3. Digital identification works well in a country with a communist system of governance but all systems of digital gathering are still vulnerable to security breaches.