Breakthrough Chinese Program Enables Hugely Effective State Control Of Everyone
The Chinese Gov’t Has Begun Installation Of A Tremendously Effective System For Pervasive Gov’t Control Of All Citizens. This Is Not Sci Fi. It’s Happening In China Right Now.
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
Separating The Sheep From The Goats
People who are familiar with Jack Vance’s novels often call him a genius, and with good reason. In my column: Is There A Cheaper, More Effective Way To Deal With Criminals Than Prison? published on October 9, 2017, I included the following excerpt from Jack Vance’s novel, Emphyrio:
“. . . at the Welfare Agency are trays of small rods, each numbered, each representing a man. I am represented by such a rod, as well as Amiante and yourself. Most of the rods are pure inactive iron; others are magnetized. At every offense or delinquency a carefully calculated magnetic charge is applied to the rod. If there are no new offenses the magnetism presently wanes and disappears. But if offenses continue, the magnetism augments and at last pulls down a signal, and the offender must be rehabilitated.”
Perhaps some visionary in the Chinese bureaucracy is a Jack Vance fan and saw the power of this idea, or maybe it’s just a case of concurrent discovery like Liebniz and Newton both independently inventing calculus.
In any event, the Chinese government has taken Vance’s idea for social control and enhanced it to the Nth degree with face recognition, monitoring of social networks, AI, electronic financial systems, and sophisticated algorithms combining in the creation of the Program For The Gov’t Control Of Everyone 2.0.
Creating A List With Every Citizen’s Social Score
The core of the new Chinese system for social control is the List which holds each citizen’s Social Score.
A Credit Score is based on a mathematical weight that is assigned to all of your financial transactions yielding a number which supposedly represents your “credit trustworthiness.”
The Chinese government’s program assigns positive and negative units to many actions a citizen takes in every aspect of his/her life. The total of these units is supposed to be represent the citizen’s “social trustworthiness” and that number is the citizen’s Social Score.
If you smoke in a nonsmoking area, minus X points are assigned to your Social Score. If you jaywalk, minus Y points. If you get a parking ticket, minus Z points. If you pay your taxes early, +X points. If you send out a tweet praising a government program, +Y points. If you attend a protest demonstration, -A points. If you are caught with illegal drugs, -B points. If you buy a lot of alcohol, -C points. If you buy Chinese-made products +D points. If you buy foreign products -D points. If you help the police in one of their investigations, +E points. If you associate with unmutual or disharmonious people, -F points. And so on and so on and so on.
Every day in every way, your government-assigned Social Score goes up or down depending on what you do and who you do it with.
This Is Real
Do you think I’m making this up? No, I’m not. This government-created List of citizens’ Social Scores is already a reality. Today tens of millions of Chinese citizens are on the List.
By 2020 the Chinese government intends to add every one of its 1.4 billion citizens to the List.
Here’s the CBS News report on China’s implementation of the List:
China’s behavior monitoring system bars some from travel, purchasing property
So, don’t think that this is just some plot from a cheesy Sci Fi movie. Much, not all, but much of what I describe in this piece as things the government can do is currently being done. The rest of it is an obvious expansion of the plan, an extrapolation of capabilities that the government would be able and be motivated to implement.
Where The Data Comes From
The List draws its data from multiple sources — social media, arrest records, and the government’s physical observations of conduct.
Today the country’s 176 million surveillance cameras watch for List-worthy behavior. By 2020 the Chinese government plans to have 600 million surveillance cameras tied into the List.
If you jaywalk, they will see you. If you speed, they will see you. Facial recognition will automatically identify you and AI algorithms will automatically update your Social Score with plus and minus points based on your observed conduct.
You won’t even know it’s happened until your Social Score gets too low. Then you will get an unpleasant surprise.
My Social Score Is Low. So What?
If you want to take a vacation outside China you will need an acceptable Social Score. If your Social Score is too low, you won’t be allowed to leave the country. If your score is even lower, they won’t let you on any plane or train to anywhere.
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UPDATE: On May 21, 2018 Business Insider published this article:
From the Business Insider story:
The [Supreme People’s] court publishes the names and ID numbers of debtors on its website. They are banned from plane and high-speed train travel, and can’t stay at four and five star hotels, send their children to expensive schools, book cheap hire cars, or make luxury purchases online.
Some provinces play a recorded message when someone tries to call a blacklisted debtor, informing the caller that the person they want to speak with has outstanding debts. And in May, a short cartoon with the photographs of debtors’ faces began playing at movie theatres, on buses, and on public noticeboards with a voiceover that said: “Come, come, look at these [debtors]. It’s a person who borrows money and doesn’t pay it back.”
The list of debtors launched in late 2013 with 31,259 names and within two weeks had been visited 180,000 times. By December 2017, 8.8 million debtors had been added to the list, preventing 8.7 million flights and 3.4 million high-speed train trips.
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This can easily be expanded to also restrict access to buses and taxis. A real social criminal will find himself unable to use any mode of transportation beyond a bicycle. No planes, trains, buses or taxis for someone whose Social Score shows that he is untrustworthy.
And if you want to buy a house you’d better have a good Social Score. If your Social Score is too low you will be barred from property ownership.
Of course a low Social Score can be remedied. You will just need to engage in some socially-approved conduct. Dedicate a few hours a week to a community-service project and your score will go up. Pay your taxes early and you will get a few extra points. Turn in a couple of neighbors who are selling untaxed hooch from an illegal still and you’re sure to see your score zoom.
Send out a bunch of tweets praising the government and your Social Score will get a nice bump. Oh, be sure to buy lots of Chinese-made products and none of that foreign stuff and you will be rewarded with a extra points.
The Carrot As Well As The Stick
As much as there are penalties for having a low Social Score there are rewards for having a high one. Would you like to send your child to a really good school? Your position on the admission list will be enhanced if you have a high Social Score. As everybody knows, trustworthy people have trustworthy children.
Would you like to get a loan? Not only will a high score help you get a loan approval, it will also get you a lower interest rate. Aren’t you glad you aren’t one of those low-scoring troublemakers who, if they can get a loan at all, will have to pay an interest rate twice as high as yours?
Correcting Bad Behavior
Since almost all of your purchases are made electronically, the government will be able to pay close attention what you’re purchasing. Are you buying a lot of alcohol? Golly, you may have a drinking problem. The government can help you. It can make sure that the credit card computers refuse to allow you to purchase more than one bottle of spirits every seven days. “Sorry Mr. Wu, your credit card/ApplePay/Whatever has refused to authorize this purchase.”
Are you visiting seedy night clubs too often. It won’t take long for your credit cards to stop working there too.
Have you pissed off the local police or some politician who can report you to the people who control the List? Opps, you’ve just lost 200 points. That’s bad because your score is now too low for you to be able to buy that new flatscreen TV you’ve been saving up for.
You show up at the store and swipe your card and the clerk tells you, “I’m sorry, Ms. Lee, you’re not authorized for that purchase. No, there’s plenty of money in your account, but your Social Score is too low for you to buy a 60-inch TV. I have a nice 27-inch model you can have if you like.”
And don’t even think about asking a friend with a better score to buy it for you. First, she knows that if she reports you they’ll give her an extra bunch of points for turning you in, so trust no one. Second, even if she’s foolish enough to take cash from you and then buy the TV for you under the table, you’re both still at risk.
The computer will likely flag the purchase because she bought a similar TV only a year and a half ago so why is she buying another one? Sounds suspicious to the AI algorithm that’s watching everyone’s credit cards for anomalous purchases.
What if some functionary shows up at her door, asking to see the new TV and it’s not there? Oh, oh, you’re both in big trouble now. Lots of demerits on both your Social Scores.
If you think you’re going to avoid all these problems by just using cash you’re sadly mistaken because, you see, the amount of cash you’re going to be allowed to take out of the bank can also be dictated by the List.
If your Social Score is dangerously low the ATM machine can be instructed not to let you have any more cash at all.
Sure, if you’ve got a Member-Of-The-Secret-Police astronomically-high score you can get oodles and oodles of money any time you want, but if you’re some borderline scofflaw, you may be limited to $100 or even $50 in cash per week. For you, the “avoid-government-control-by-using-cash” tactic will be a miserable failure.
Criminal Sentences Can Be Dependent On Your Social Score
And you’d better hope that you don’t get arrested because your punishment will likely be dictated by your place on the List. Now me, I’m a sterling fellow and staunch government supporter and I can brown-nose the authorities with the best of them, so when I get caught driving drunk I just lose a bunch of points and maybe do a weekend in jail.
But you’re a well-known social parasite, so your terrible Social Score will guarantee you two or three months in the pokey, at least. You had better watch your step and change your ways or life is going to become very hard for you.
As Bob Dylan said:
Look out kid,don’t matter what you did.Walk on your tip toes.Don’t try No Doz.Better stay away from thosewho play around the fire hose.Keep a clean nose andwash the plain clothes.You don’t need a weather manto know which way the wind blows
So, get out there and volunteer to pick up trash from the park, tweet about what a great job the police are doing, inform on a couple of neighbors, pay your taxes early and often, always be sure not only to vote but, more importantly, to vote for the right candidates.
And don’t complain. Never, ever complain.
Do all that and you’ll be rewarded with a Social Score what will guarantee you low-interest government loans, places for your kids in the best schools, promotions at work, discount vacations at government-approved resorts, and all the other perks that a right-thinking, reliable, trustworthy citizen deserves.
On the other hand, smoke and drink, take drugs, drive too fast, park illegally, shoplift, get into fights, criticize the government, don’t pay your taxes, make a nuisance of yourself, demonstrate your proclivity for unmutual and disharmonious behavior and you’ll quickly find yourself living in some crappy neighborhood with no access to buses or nice restaurants or cold beers while you teeter on the knife edge of incipient incarceration.
To paraphrase the Talosians: Right thinking is rewarded. Wrong thinking is punished.
Aging The Scores
Of course, the system will need to employ a mechanism that more heavily weights new scores in relation to old scores. Each old score will need to deteriorate by some factor over the passage of time. This will be child’s play for the computer. It can treat each individual award of points like a loan balance to which negative compound interest is applied.
Each day that goes by each award of points that was used to calculate your overall Social Score will slightly decrease so that day-by-day the old point awards will decline in a known, predictable way. This way the slow evaporation of old points will increase the importance of newer points in determining your current score.
Deviants who mend their ways will find their scores improving as time goes by. People of value who fall from grace and slip into bad habits will find their lives getting harder.
The New Reality
Electronic payment systems, facial recognition systems, wide-spread CCTV networks, sophisticated AI algorithms, and the government’s desire to effectively and cheaply discourage drug abuse, spousal abuse, alcoholism, terrorism, petty crime and anti-government activities have all converged to enable this new Chinese system of government control — your Social Score.
Have a poor Credit Score and you won’t be able to buy anything on credit. Have a poor Social Score and you won’t be able to own a house or leave the city.
Make no mistake. This is a powerful system and other governments are going to take notice.
We are in for interesting times.
Update: After publishing this column, the South China Morning Post published this story: China is mining data directly from workers’ brains on an industrial scale — Government-backed surveillance projects are deploying brain-reading technology to detect changes in emotional states in employees on the production line, the military and at the helm of high-speed trains
From this story:
One of the main centres of the research in China is Neuro Cap, a central government-funded brain surveillance project at Ningbo University.
The programme has been implemented in more than a dozen factories and businesses.
Jin Jia, associate professor of brain science and cognitive psychology at Ningbo University’s business school, said a highly emotional employee in a key post could affect an entire production line, jeopardizing his or her own safety as well as that of others.
“When the system issues a warning, the manager asks the worker to take a day off or move to a less critical post. Some jobs require high concentration. There is no room for a mistake,” she said.
I would say that the Chinese are pursuing an aggressive “Big Brother” model of society. IMHO, if you want to worry about the establishment of a totalitarian government, this is the sort of behavior you should be watching out for.
— David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
