Western perception of “Social credit” largely propaganda btw and if you believe it isnt then you got manipulated.
You must log in or # to comment.
With or without credit scores, banks are going to be assessing you for whether you’re likely to pay back the loans they provide. Even if you deleted all credit scores overnight so everyone had to do individual assessments, you’re still getting assessed and a credit score in all but name will emerge. If you’re a high risk, banks will just put a big mark on your name that says “Don’t lend to this person, they don’t pay their debts” like they do in Austria.
The only real difference between the US Credit Score and the Chinese Social Credit is that the Chinese Social Credit takes other factors into account in whether you are considered worthy enough to have a loan, which isn’t aaaall that different to how it’s done in the UK, where registering to vote makes your credit score go up, but then again lenders in the UK don’t tend to use credit scores for things like mortgages, they use their own checks.
The only time you need to borrow money from a bank is of you are buying a house, really. Remove the strong incentive to buy a place to live and then a credit score becomes a vague thing that only people working in finance know or care about.
9/10 times yeah you’re only really borrowing money from a bank for mortgages and that’s the only loan you NEED to have. Otherwise there’s credit cards, small business loans, car loans etc. You can probably get-by without those though.
banks are going to be assessing you for whether you’re likely to pay back the loans they provide
Actually, this is not quite accurate. It’s more accurately a score that summarizes how much the banks would want to lend you money. It is designed to make sure you are profitable not just in your ability to simply pay back a loan, but also to make them money.
And, statistically, it’s also systemically racist.
It was systematically racist before credit scores as well. Before credit scores, whether you got a loan was dependent on the bank manager ‘liking you’, and by that I mean if you stepped into that room with skin any darker than the sheets the bank manager wore at the weekend, you weren’t getting a loan.
Both are bad and both countries are authoritarian shit holes
Yes and No. Ask Lee Camp how China treats Tibet.
Truly modern China’s most successful imperialist venture, though Belt and Road may top that
Ask Natives, black people, Mexicans how they’re treated in America.
So actually looked into the social credit system a while ago and it turns out a lot of it is myth and it seems to have been largely wound down after some abuse by some of the ?prefectures? where it was trialed and used to punish a few people (it was supposed to reward good behaviour by businesses and institutions apparently) but what remains did strike me as very similar to credit score, although it’s maybe slightly more accountable? Maybe?
Anyway both seem dogshit, although a system verifying how organisations actually act (e.g. counter greenwashing and shit with hard evidence) would be cool if anyone could make it work.
The ABC (Australian public broadcaster) did a thorough explainer debunking many of the myths around it recently.
As usual, investigation into socialist practices reveals that the negative opinions held by the west are largely based on propaganda and lies.
The Chinese social credit thing is a myth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
Because our ssn was stolen many of times, our credit score was low even after we fought off all the charges and couldn’t get an apartment without a garentour. Moved to Spain and never needed a garentour or social check in basic necessities, hell we could go for a loan and the only thing judged is our reasoning. Slowly waiting for permanent residency and citizenship :)
“There has been a widespread misconception that China operates a nationwide and unitary social credit “score” based on individuals’ behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low. Media reports in the West have sometimes exaggerated or inaccurately described this concept. It issued guidelines clarifying that citizens could not be punished for having low scores”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
Social credit in China is more about gauging trustworthiness of business entities. Something that is a great benefit to their citizens.
It sounds like it was the sort of horrid “good citizen” system in pilot cities until it was stopped
In 2019, the central government voiced dissatisfaction with pilot cities experimenting with social credit scores. It issued guidelines clarifying that citizens could not be punished for having low scores and that punishments should only be limited to legally defined crimes and civil infractions. As a result, pilot cities either discontinued their point-based systems or restricted them to voluntary participation with no major consequences for having low scores.
Removed by mod
So after many long years you finally learn what they tried to clarify to you literally every time you tried to use it as a racist cudgel
And the only way to make the round peg fit in the square hole of your propaganda addled brain is to somehow twist it into them still being delusional and wrong?
Eh. I guess it’s still progress.
Removed by mod
You’re gonna have to explain to me why that’s a bad word but you’re gonna have to find someone who doesn’t enable genocide because I ain’t listening to you talk shit
Removed by mod
Do you use the word ‘tankie’ to distinguish yourself from people who can read?
That may be the case but you people have to stop trying to defend China all the time. You can’t even search the word “democracy” without being added to a list.
Ah yeah, because the five eyes (of which the UK is a member) doesn’t flag people and add them to watchlists for comments potentially like this one
This reads like someone who can’t fathom that some people genuinely do like China and think it’s doing a good job. It always comes back to Western chauvinism where we think that our values like liberal capitalism and bourgeois democracy are inherently superior to the values held by most people in the global south. Maybe they don’t always want what we want.
Too much criticism of China is based on falsehoods and deliberate misrepresentation of certain aspects of Chinese society, culture, and politics. Case in point: the social credit system. Criticism is fine if it’s fair and based on facts.
Interesting, where are you citing from?
They were never heard from again lol 🤣
I am currently reading a book (Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers) by a CCP member and he talks about:
- The merits of Democracy
- Tienamen Square
- A better leadership style for China than what they have
So you can talk about these things, but what isn’t allowed is being inflammatory.
Uh, that’s not exactly exonerating material. Any government that would restrict Or crack down on those who would tell their government to go fuck itself. Can go fuck itself.
By all means, if we are discussing, removing rights from an individual or a group, be dispassionate and fact-based all day every day. But if we are telling the victims of abuse that their complaints are invalid or illegal because they feel emotion from the damage done to them. Fuck that shit.
Being inflammatory is not the same as someone complaining about an unjust government nor is it the same as feeling bad about something. It is a rhetorical strategy that is not suited for bridging misunderstandings and that is why such content gets removed from their platforms.
Saying the CCP violates human rights, is unequivocally true and factual. It’s also inflammatory. There’s nothing wrong with inflammatory speech. And biased policing of it destroys bridges and builds rightful resentment.
My government is also currently involved with similar violations. And I’m not going to let them police my language either. Forcing us to use language that favors them or makes light of their atrocities. Good governments don’t do that. Inflammatory actions justify inflammatory language. Fuck what trump or the CCP thinks.
Again, you are allowed to say the CCP does not respect human rights as defined by the west, they will openly agree with that statement and repeat it back to you. But to say the people don’t have rights to even say that is inflammatory because it is false.
I’m pretty sure Trump will put you on a list for searching that too
Did anyone say USA is not a shithole?
It’s usually directly implied that America doesn’t have the same level of censorship. So when it comes to searching the term “democracy” the poster was very clearly implying you do not get put on lists for simple searches in America. Perhaps they didn’t mean to do so but this is very typical
There’s more to the world than USA and China. Europe for example.
Two words for Europe: Chat Control.
Ah yes Europe where you totally won’t get put on a list or driven out from a country like France for making a secure android rom
Damn, what happened here? I can only feel the warm ground, but I can tell there was a fire.
ikr, i feel like i missed the drama
There are more ‘social scores’ than just the credit one. The main difference is that in the West it’s kept in secret, while China is open about it. Of course, it’s also different than American propaganda says.
Arguments can be made both in favor and against such systems or their parts. I think we can all agree that the American one goes far beyond reasonable social utility. The Chinese one too, probably. China may be a lot better than our media tells us, but it’s still far from perfect.
The Chinese social credit system is largely a myth. It was a thing that got instituted city by city and was originally intended to be something like the Better Business Bureau or the FICO credit score in the US, but after a few cities used it to justify punishing individuals instead of championing good business it got rolled back in most places, with a new edict from the central government that such systems must never be used for punishment or restriction. Most Chinese have never had a “social credit score” and it was never a nationally-managed program.
I really wish I understood the Chinese legal system better. It’s like they operate under a different constellation of rights and it isn’t immediately obvious to me how these cases play out. Maybe I should try finding some modern legal dramas from the mainland…
So credit scores are… good?
I hate you.
Could at least argue credit shows your payment history and debt to income ratio, social credit score could be literally anything. Both can suck at the same time.
Isnt social credit system just a meme?
No, it effects a lot of ways in which you are allowed to live
Not sure why you got a downvote, this is absolutely true. If you have a low SSC you may be subject to travel bans, reduced employment prospects, being barred from attending certain schools, increased surveillance and police monitoring, and public shaming. Other individuals can also have their scores lowered by interacting with you.
You say western but I live in the UK and while credit ratings exist here I have never had a reason to care about them. Never even had a credit card. Only time I borrowed money is for my mortgage.
You say western but I live in the UK
You’re fucking with me right? …
Edit: My bad, did not understand the point you were making.
My new response is no shit you don’t gotta worry about credit score if you never owned a credit card lol
you don’t gotta worry about credit score if you never owned a credit card lol
You don’t understand what credit score is then.
The usual response I get to not having a credit card is that I must get a credit score to rent or buy a house. Nope.
I’m in the market for a house, so I got my first credit card at the pleading of my broker and have just been putting my essentials on it to push my score over 800. It’s fucking stupid, I’m 40 and financially comfortable with a long history of fiscal responsibility, but I’ll play the stupid credit line game for a year or two to appease the algorithm and then shred the thing once I buy.
I have a feeling that there are a lot of ex-Occupy types like me coming up on that average homebuyers age, having eschewed the banking system for the past 20 years and now being forced to begrudgingly “play ball” like this just to get qualified to pay the money that they already have.
What the fuck is this nonsense?
Nobody likes credit scores but it’s at least marginally financial measurements that are used for financial decisions.
It’s regressive, but only because our society is regressive. A middle class person who overspends and doesn’t pay their bills on time is probably gonna get treated better than a poor person who needs groceries and fails to pay their grocery bills on time, yes. But it’s still financial.
The poor person isn’t being stopped from buying a train ticket. They might not have money to do so, but that’s a different societal fuck up.
At least compare apples to apples.
“It’s only financial I swear! Please don’t look up the countless studies on racial biases! Please!!”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_credit_scoring_systems_in_the_United_States#Racism
Yikes dude…
Societal outcomes are worse pretty much across the board for all of those groups. See my long middle paragraph about how our whole society is fucked up.
Every item listed on that page is a measurement indicating the end result which is inequality. Nothing on that page covers the why or the how. If Equifax is literally scoring people based on “how black a name sounds” (as with resume studies) then sure the actual scoring system is also broken. But it doesn’t say that, it says outcomes are worse and unequal. Just like every other outcome in this country.
Wow, you should have let those scientists know about that so they wouldn’t have wasted their time with these studies.
Great analysis dude.
I know you’re pissed at me but that was kinda weak. I don’t think there’s anything unreasonable about saying our society is fucked up but a very different style of fucked up vs china.
Especially considering that china sorta looked at the most fucked up parts of the credit score system and deliberately said “I want that, but more invasive and with the government running it” something like half a century later.
From what I’ve seen Dogbert is really obsessed with the Chinese state to the point of ignoring the fundamental structural issues it has. Is the Chinese state better for the average citizen than the US, probably in a lot of metrics, but as everywhere it is heavily dependent on who you are and where you live.
I’ve done some reflashing of cellular modems and the best place for open source modem firmware I found was some Chinese language hacker communities and they didn’t seem jazzed about the hoops they had to jump through to get to the clear net just to collaborate with the rest of the world. When information is restricted to that extent it is symptomatic of an extremely adversarial relationship between the government and its citizens.
What authoritarians of any stripe don’t realize that by abdicating their autonomy to any state, no matter the color of the flag or what ideology it espouses, ends in one way repression and death. If there is an out group there is a high likely hood that even a true believer will find themselves in it at some point. There is a tendency for authoritarian structures like states and corps to justify their existence through a progress at any cost mentality. This is true for western capitalism as well as Soviet and Chinese implementations of socialism. Any cost may be Lake Karachay’s ecosystem or the cultural extinction and enslavement of native people who live on land rich in rare earth minerals, it also means any citizen who becomes inconvenient to the state.
Not to say credit scores are fun, but comparing the two is kinda absurd. Credit scores are calculated by private companies and used by banks to determine your eligibility for a loan. Essentially, it’s an averaged history of how good you are at repaying debt, and it’s used to determine if you will repay future debt. The people who calculate your score have no interest in how it affects you. The social credit system is a government score and has tons of things that can affect it, and there’s plenty of opportunity for fudgery to screw you over. There are tons of ways in can negatively affect you. Worst of all, it can be used to deny international flights, and in effect your ability to escape the system. Since this is actually run by the government, it creates an avenue for punishing political dissent and control that just doesn’t exist with credit scores.
Right in the first half, extremely wrong in the second half (But you should be forgiven, we all get heavily propagandized about this stuff). What we know of the Chinese “social credit” score in the west is largely a tall tale / myth. Here, from the top of the English wikipedia article about the Chinese system:
There has been a widespread misconception that China operates a nationwide and unitary social credit “score” based on individuals’ behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low. Media reports in the West have sometimes exaggerated or inaccurately described this concept.[4][5][6] In 2019, the central government voiced dissatisfaction with pilot cities experimenting with social credit scores. It issued guidelines clarifying that citizens could not be punished for having low scores and that punishments should only be limited to legally defined crimes and civil infractions. As a result, pilot cities either discontinued their point-based systems or restricted them to voluntary participation with no major consequences for having low scores.[4][7] According to a February 2022 report by the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a social credit “score” is a myth as there is “no score that dictates citizen’s place in society”.[4]
It’s still a credit score system, so it’s still one of those dumb monolithic systems a large authoritarian country implements when it can’t be bothered to keep track of it’s citizens on a qualitative level - Like FICO in the US - But it doesn’t leak outside of that context in the way we westerners are told. In fact, our myths about that probably came out of the incidents in 2019 when the central government tamped down on local abuses of the system.
The Social Credit doesn’t exist, FICO does. One has more impact because it’s real.
The main difference is that credit score exists while the Chinese social score doesn’t.
Yes they are. Moron take.
Please argue how. As someone from a country where credit scores aren’t a thing, they really look the same.
Two things can be bad at the same time.
This thought-terminating cliche is getting so tired. You may as well just say “let’s just agree to disagree”.
It’s telling that this cliche is most often applied when western whataboutism is correctly called out, and all it does is serve to legitimize the act of manufacturing consent against China.
USA invents credit score way back in the 50s
credit score is immediately used to pull off the most calculatingly misogynistic, racist, and classist financial enforcement in modern history.
china implements a technically similar system that aims not to control working people’s financial agency, but to strengthen public trust.
the west immediately spins up the presses and releases dozens of hit pieces a year that manufacture consent against China by portraying the Chinese social credit system as an orwellian nightmare that will rip a child out of their parent’s home if the household spends too much time on videos games.
leftists identify this whataboutism and correctly call it out
liberals drop one of their various thought-terminating cliches to (not so) subtly bolster the western narrative - thus manufacturing consent against China.
You’ve been effortlessly oriented by the State Department and its various propaganda apparatus.
If you believe China’s social credit system is a good way to “strengthen public trust” then I want to know how you feel about people like Xu Xiaodong, whose social credit was destroyed for exposing fake martial artists and refusing to apologize to them.
If you violate a court order in my country you get sent to prison. China is so progressive that you aren’t even put under house arrest for the same offense.
I like that you brought up an example that can be analyzed. The court ordered him to apologize and he didn’t follow through, there has to be some consequence to disobeying a judge. But it seems to me they could benefit from less hegemonic judges.
