Gamified Control? China's Social Credit Systems

Katika Kühnreich In 2014 China's Communist Party (CP) published a
“Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System
(2014-2020)”. The CP announced the system to be mandatory for every
Chinese person in 2020. It is no theoretical babbling about
something happening in a far future: The CP started experimenting
with such social credit systems (SCS) in different regions soon
after, allowed the private development of such systems, and was
cited to become world leader of SCS. While the official goal of the
SCS is to level economic development and to bring harmony,
sincerity and trust to the whole country, the question is what the
“side effects” might be. Starting with a review of the current
state of social credit systems (SCS) in China, examples of their
functions and examples of consequences of their existence will be
provided. This information will be embedded into a short walk
through the People's Republic's Internet landscape, its big
players, and the CP's digital policies. In the following this will
be set it in relation to current ideological turns and the CP's
announcement to become the world leader in SCS. China's SCS is seen
as an extreme example of a tendency that has developed in most
industrialized countries. It displays what can be drawn from the
huge amount of information provided by us via ICTs and so-called
“social media”. And it can show possible consequences of the
combination of big data and nearly endless storage on one hand and
evaluation by algorithms on the other. From the point of view that
this aspect of digitalization is not a problem of the Chinese but
for all of us, it will lead to the question how critical thinking
and dissenting actions can develop in a reality that is constantly
rating behavior to create a score that will be defining vast parts
of our life. Ending in a discussion on possibilities of big data
based social rating, cybernetics, and social control and modes of
dissent and resistance.