China, Social Credit, TikTok

Transcript and further talking points

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Hi I’m Lamar and this is Deconstruct.

Today, I am really excited to share this topic one, because it is an idea that is so sci-fi in nature that it is almost hard to comprehend exactly what’s being done, and two, because I literally think of the possibilities of this tech with awe and ultimately a great deal of worry. What I am referring to is the Chinese Social Credit System.

There are always things to worry about like interpersonal relationships, climate change and antibiotic resistance, and hell our 2020 presidential election, but this is like a social project that has crept its way up into the mainstream in the most ubiquitous way. I find it so interesting because it this new form of colonization — a path of surveillance capitalism, and where that takes them, I am entirely unsure — and it’s kind of complicated to untangle, but it’s something that I’ll get more into throughout the episode.

If you hear something that moves you in some particular way, email me, tell me your thoughts and ideas and qualms should there be any, you contact me at deconstructmediapod@gmail.com.

Okay on with the show.

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In China, there is a system that is to be deemed the “Social Credit System” which will use the Big Data the government has collected from its citizens and abroad along with their heavily utilized CCTV footage to create a surveillance state. The system, set to debut this year — in 2020, has been dubbed “the most ambitious experiment in digital social control ever undertaken”73. The main purpose behind this system is that the Chinese government wants to begin monitoring, rating, and regulating everything about their state including the citizens, the financials, and even their “social, moral, and possibly, political behavior”.

One of the biggest reasons why this technology can work is Facial Recognition. They also believe that this system would be a tool that would inevitably grow their economy and ultimately make them the most powerful nation in the world.

Things that I have mentioned in previous episodes like, Big data, Algorithms, and AI — they are intertwined, meaning there really cannot be one without the other. You can create an AI-based software, however, algorithms are needed for them to function, and the only thing that would make that artificial intelligence actually intelligent, is data — and lots of it. The more data the AI has the better it will be at performing its core actions.

How this system is set up is that every citizen is provided a social credit score, similar to how in most countries, a new-born child will have a social security number which eventually has a credit score attached to it. That score will increase or decrease specifically dependent on their behavior and financial status.

From a plethora of sources as broad as government records, and as personal as their social media usage, internet history, shopping tendencies, and their interactions in the digital world — you create a trail and a digital human being with all of your tendencies alike, and the government sees this. Depending on how that behavior lines up with the values the Chinese government wants to impress upon its citizens, your score will either increase or decrease — either increasing or decreasing one’s social and economic mobility. Shifting in the balance with each action.

Of course, the Chinese government outlines specifically, methods by which one’s score could increase or decrease. There are actions one can do in order to make their score go up such as positively influencing one’s neighbor, taking care of elderly family, engaging in charity work, praising the government on social media, and having a good financial history. Some of the actions that will decrease ones score are behaviors such as illegal protesting, traffic violations (drunk driving and jaywalking), posting anti-government messages on social media, participating in anything deemed to be a cult.

If you so happen to land on the positive side of that score, meaning that your social credit score is above that 1000pt threshold, you will have access to benefits such as admission priority for schools and employment, priority list for public housing, tax breaks, cheaper public transport and so much more. However, falling under that threshold has consequences such as the denial of licenses and access to social services, less access to credit, exclusion from being able to travel domestic and abroad, no access to private schools, and even public shaming which would be exposure of that person’s face in public spaces with their information.

And this, like all technological advancements, or just advancements in general, they have the ability to be used for good as well as evil, and while that as regular listeners will hear is already become quite the motif of this podcast, and — its happening… there.. right now.

There is a group of people within China who have systematically been victims of racial/religious discrimination and targeting by law enforcement in a similar, and likely a more degrading manner, than the situation for African- Americans in America and the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar.

They are known as the Uighurs

For centuries, they have been continually persecuted and it has been reported that Chinese officials have silenced the academics who have come out of that culture to explain the plight their people had succumb too75. This has created a growing concern in how this systemic bias will effect the relationship the Uighurs have with the state as well as in society.

There was even a tiktok video that got really popular under this disguise of being a makeup tutorial —

CLIP

And then she got banned becasue TikTok is owned by a Mainland China-based company……….. yikes.

But implementing this technology can put China in a position whereby it heightens the growing inequality between them and the Uighurs. One way this works is “Blacklisting”. The best way to explain this phenomenon is to look at a case by PC Pro and Vice Writer Nicole Kobie. She wrote about a man named Liu Hu who was blacklisted and subsequently jailed.

Nicole explained that Hu is a journalist working in mainland China. He writes pieces that address censorship and government corruption. Due to this work, he was arrested and fined, and then eventually he was blacklisted.

What Liu had found was that he was on the “List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement by Supreme People’s Court” as not qualified to purchase things such as a plane or train tickets. He even began having trouble buying his own property and accessing public funds. He explained that the really frightening aspect of this problem is that there is legitimately nothing that the blacklisted person can do, “you are stuck in the middle of nowhere”77. Kobie further explained that “there are no genuine protections for the people and entities subject to the system”78. There is no such thing as rule of law; regulations that are currently in place can be largely apolitical, however as soon as the communist party of China, the CCP, uses them — its only for political purposes that aim to delegitimize certain groups of their population — largely Muslims.

And that is just one story of many. Many of which include mass detention of Uighurs and other Muslims, sexual abuse, women who undergo forced abortions or have contraceptive devices implanted against their will, some have witnessed people kill themselves in these camps, and many Uighur families have been separated.

And like you are probably now, I was asking myself, “Why is this happening, what is it about this specific group of people that is causing so much strife among the government? There has to be a reason right?”

Well, I dug a little deeper into this tangent to find out the Chinese officials have been concerned about the possibility that Chinese Uighurs could be holding quote extremist and separatist ideology. So the Chinese government sees the camps as a way to ameliorate, or lessen the possibility that there will be a threat to their national security. In essence, the Chinese government views Muslims and the religion of Islam in a similar light that Americans and plenty of other countries view them — as eminent threats to security and culture.

This perceived threat is so potent in their society that there have been reports of Military guards who have been sent to known Uighur households and have essentially stayed with the families and even share a bed with the wife of the man in order to, among other nefarious reasons, to ensure 24/7 that they are not doing anything that revolves around Muslim culture. This is a cultural genocide that is currently taking place.

Their president, Xi Jinping, was warning the country of the quote toxicity of religious extremism. In a landmark uncovers by The NEw York Times, there were some audio clips that they had gotten ahold of which involved President Xi talking about extreme dictatorial behavior in regards to dealing with the Uigruhs. He had even laid the groundwork for a massive undertaking, but had never sent any go ahead. However, the NYTimes found that he had repeatedly called on police officials to quote “round up everyone who should be round up”

And there is something that I want to point out in that message, as ambiguous as that may sound, there is an idea that is salient through the entire sentence — that is that “anyone who is perceived to be Muslim, is to be detained.” It was a mob boss kind of strategy that we see in how other authoritarian leaders run their own despotic regimes. Dealing in this way provides this sort of plausible deniability between the person in authority and their subjects. So when it comes time to face war crime charges, the person calling these shots can make the claim that this was misinterpretation and that the exact idea was never explicitly mentioned. I hate this argument because it ignores the vast amounts of information — the nonverbal cues we send and receive to people and how those play a special effect on us and on our interactions, and to discount all of that on the basis of quote “I never said those words explicitly,” is absurd.

On the policy side of this issue,

It has been publicized that China does not adhere to international human rights in the same ways other countries in the world do. Holding that statement as indeed fact, the possibility of a situation whereby the Uighurs happen to become blacklisted at a higher rate than other Chinese citizens, is incredibly likely. If the government is already allowing this form of discrimination and cultural genocide, it can be taken as a given that the logical next step is to use the Facial Recognition software to target members of that community by increased levels of surveillance or even physical policing as in the United States.

The story of Liu Hu’s issue with the government underscores many problems within the idea of having a social credit system. It seems as though this system is not in place in order to maintain style safety of the public, but to control the things that they are doing or saying in a way that is highly violative of their human rights as many researchers have found.

There are a large subset of problems that deal in the realm of facial recognition, and the main reason to cover this topic at length is strictly due to its proximity to the humans today. It is quite a revolutionary technology, in learning that there were countries that were in the talks of creating a system using facial recognition for so many societal applications, one could only think of the implications of that very notion.

There are wonderful things that Facial Recognition software could do especially in situations in which police services need to find the suspect they have been looking for, which has happened in the past. Facial recognition is on the phones of many people in the world. There are circumstances that call for the use of the technology such as identifying the body of someone who does not have identification. This technology could come in to use in so many ways. However, there are malicious uses of it, and it is necessary to ask if the utilization of this advanced algorithm is not causing any undue burden onto the citizens. That discussion seems to be far out of the picture for the government in China at this point.

The Conversation

And with that being said, I want to point out that in using China as an example of the ways in which this technology and AI can be used to exacerbate inequality, that China has a history of this abuse of power. Coming from the era of Mao Zedong, it could be quite understandable in seeing how that form of government could have been normalized in their society, nonetheless, it is a path that can be taken by any state regardless of their past. This is what makes focusing on the social credit system so valuable — it is an outsider’s perspective on a very possible future in the age of rapid technological advancement.

And for a fleeting moment, I was able to gain an insider’s perspective as to the happenings in China. I had an interaction with a woman who is from Mainland China and is currently living in the U.S., and frequently visits China to see family. And what she says, really, uh… really sheds a different light on China and its perceived corrosive use of modern technologies. Halfway through our conversation, I really felt the need to whip out my phone and record some audio since I felt as though I wouldn’t have an interaction like this again unless I solicited it.

But I kept thinking to myself that it could possibly change the whole vibe, so I decided not to. So after the conversation, I feverishly typed everything I could remember onto a pages document. I was glad that I caught a glimpse of her ID on her handbag though, her last name, was Cheng. She was an older woman, tall — about 5’8, graying black hair, the streaks were going through her bangs as they feathered just above her eyebrows. She had a large bag that weighed her down as she walked, and the clothes that she had on looked colorful and comfortable. Her skin was wrinkled, and looked soft. She talked about the success of her children with a wide smile and on her face. One child lives in China doing investment banking and the other works at a tech firm in San Francisco.

She explained to me her parents before she was born. They were living in Mainland China in the 1930’s before the reign of Mao Zedong. Her parent’s family was poor, much like the rest of China at that time. They had family members, friends, and relatives, who had died of starvation. It was a grim image of life in Mainland China. Then Mao came along and he brought along with him an era of prosperity to a certain extent. They were working, they were able to afford to eat and live, have vacations, invest, and things were looking up for them.

However, as some people may remember from history class, Mao… he was… um… a bad guy to say the very least. His philosophy “Maoism” is quoted to be a form of communism developed by Mao Tse Tung. It is a doctrine to capture State power through a combination of armed insurgency, mass mobilization and strategic alliances. The Maoists also use propaganda and disinformation against State institutions as other components of their insurgency doctrine.“

But he transformed their economy and their lives in such positive ways, but in his efforts, he was constantly viewing his authority with a scarcity mindset — always believing that his power was running out and doing more in order to regain control. His zeal for power caused him to launch the “Cultural Revolution”. This was a plan that sought to impure certain elements of their culture and of their society that they didn’t agree with and to quote revive the revolutionary spirit — which I take as just another way to spell toxic nationalism.

Under the Mao regime, more than one and a half million people died. Shortly after, there were various cities and communities that were absolute anarchy and Mao sends in troops to deal with the problem.

Cheng explained to me that during the reign of Mao, when she was a little girl, given that she is Chinese and Buddhist, like the rest of the majority, her family were able to enjoy the benefits of being seen as a regular citizen; they benefitted from the economy, they benefitted from the democratization of education, they benefitted from the most facets of society while their Muslim neighbors suffered.

Her story gets really interesting because even though she explained to me that Mao was a terrible person, and the President today, XI Jinping is corrupt in so many ways, everything that is happening with the Social Credit System, she likes and prefers. She explained that prior to the system being active in the country, she had felt a constant threat to her safety. She had friends and relatives who had told her stories about mugging that had happened to them or their friends, her close girlfriends had talked about a rape that they had undergone, and all of this happened without much police intervention. So, she explained, the technology, makes her feels incredibly safe. People have obeyed the employment because frankly there is nothing you really can do. And I even pushed her on this a little bit, because I asked her “even if people are being unjustly persecuted by this technology, purposefully by the government, this technology is still good in your eyes because of the shift in criminal activity that you have perceived?” And she said, yes.

So once the conversation reached that inflection point, we had finally stopped discussing china, and started talking about Facebook and Brexit, and that was a riveting conversation, for another time though hahahaha, okay, i think its decent for a break.

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And what we came to in this conversation is that there is a little Make China Great Again going on

Studies have already shown that there have been groups of people that are clamoring for democratic rule in China that have been silenced by the government. One instance was how the government was actively thwarting one of its citizens from participating in an electoral contest. Zhang Shangen was blocked at every single turn in his quest for local election80. It was stated by the candidate the government was manipulating everything in society. Other candidates made claims that they could never get elected simply due to how the system works. These are people who have different ideology than the current government, and rather than listening to their population, they remain in control of what they determine is correct and what is order.

In regards to their data rights, for China, the era of privacy is over. That is to say it is the end of the western idea of privacy in the east. This data that is acquired from millions of CCTV footage data in along with the artificial intelligence required for facial recognition in combination with their governments efforts of thwarting democracy, it will create a vacuum for Chinese citizens. This creates a legal vacuum in which the citizens no longer have any power in what their government does.

It became increasingly apparent that at this point, the technology like Facial Recognition is beginning to have even greater capabilities. There is newer software which uses a 3D model of the person’s face claiming that it have a greater level of accuracy. What this software does is “a real-time 3D image of a person’s facial surface, 3D facial recognition uses distinctive features of the face — where rigid tissue and bone is most apparent, such as the curves of the eye socket, nose and chin — to identify the subject”81. This newly developed software has the potential to make facial recognition much stronger and much more accurate than it was before.

In seeing this, the idea that became so clear was that, there were no advancements in detecting how this technology could be perfected in such a way that would not misidentify people; this is something that we see in today’s models of facial recognition that are employed in the U.S. When facial rec technology you is used to identify someone who is black, it has been reported to overwhelmingly misidentify black men and even more so in dealing with black women. especially. It seems as though while there are necessary advancements in the technology, there seems to be little to no discussion on how these technologies have the biases previously discussed and how they can affect a given population. Granted, advancements in the technology may rid the technology of that problem, but without the conversation about it, the time whereby that happens and the discourse that happens in the meantime may become untenable. It has already been exhibited for decades of police brutality backlash from the minority community in the U.S. A situation which is normally addressed with self-righteous sentiments about one’s own racial history and background.

It is a pattern that could easily be replicated in such a way that parallels how implicit bias works in society today which is the main argument of this essay. In going forward, there will be a much more broken down analysis of everything that has just been discussed and what it all means and how everything connects into one narrative.

It is something that I addressed very briefly toward the end of my conversation with Cheng.

I asked very bluntly about how she felt about the Social credit system being employed and it indiscriminately targeting Uighur Muslims, and in a round about way, she explained that the Uighurs are committing crimes and violent ones at that, and if that is the life that they want to live, then they will have to pay the consequences. And it left me with this odd feeling that stuck with me the rest of the day and even into my sleep.

What’s going on in China, and what I see in this woman is a similar construct that I see in America. There is a trend toward nationalistic pride that is growing more and more exclusive. Little by little authoritarian regimes all over the world are trying to chip away at their definition of a citizen and even more broadly, their definition of a person and what specific rights are inalienable — which ones are birth-right.

And what we see is this attack on people who are different in that pursuit of making citizenship more and more exclusionary and in a way that imbues the idea that these nations, strong and powerful, and rich nations like Great Britain, the U.S., China, Russia, etcetera are operating in this scarcity mindset which is transmuted through the ways by which they govern their populous.

It ultimately frightens me because what is happening in China, right now, in 2020, is this concept. It is a concept of what our future could be. See China has been all-in when it comes to artificial intelligence and renewable energy since like 2017, their government literally made a statement saying so and has put their money where there semi-truck-sized-mouths are. So when it comes to things like data and technology, they already have the largest data set of people and their movement among all of the several world powers. Their tech is bangin, and this is overall a really complete and solid operation, so i guess props to President Xi Jinping for bringing us one step further into the future of tech and its potential uses for society, however BOOO to President Xi Jinping for utilizing what could have been for social good, as a means of intensifying cultural and ethnic genocide of those who do not pray and dress like you, the Uighur Muslims.

And all this technology will do to these communities of Uighurs is harass them on the streets, increased surveillance on daily activities, and anything that becomes just above reproach, their social credit score continues to decrease — worsening their chances of social mobility — their ability to move up the social latter, what we see as the American dream. Hindering someone from doing that based solely upon their religious and cultural practices is a crime and is completely unjust in nature.

So when it comes time, inevitably, for the U.S. to deploy a surveillance scheme of this nature, it is imperative that we do have a diverse set of people working on this from the moment of conception, otherwise we will see a human rights catastrophe at the exact magnitude or greater similar to china. We will see increased surveillance in minority communities to the largest extent, we will see even more economic inequality then we do today, and that threat grows increasingly salient with every single human rights violation I read about.

We’ll be right back

Commercial

So, this assault on Muslims is going to be something that I will probably talk about more in this podcast seeing as though international relations, public policy and tech seem to be like my thing or whatever, so if that’s your thing or even if it’s not, definitely subscribe and rate the show five stars on Apple Podcasts. And if you found this topic interesting, share the show on twitter or Facebook or something — get people to understand why this is so important.

But that’s a wrap for this week

Salutation

This is Deconstruct and I’m Lamar — signing off.

Later peeps.