[darthoctopus]

Did you even read the article? Here is the situation in China:

> Here's what's actually happening. As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.

Compare that to the situation with, say, credit scores in the US --- wholly run by an oligopoly of three private companies, but fully ingrained into how personal finances work here. At least a publicly run credit score would be held accountable, however indirectly, to voters and the law; and its safety might be treated as a matter of national security, rather than having Equifax and Experian leaking data like clockwork.

[torginus]

I've always told people that social credit as used by China was unsed to track dishonest businesses who scammed people and/or other businesses by breaking agreements and not delivering as promised.

The fact there's a credit system that protects banks from the people makes it painfully obvious who is in charge of Western society - consider this:

You take out a loan to contract the company to build you a house. The company defaults and disappears overnight. The bank is protected automatically but it's up to you have to run after your money yourself.

[slightwinder]

> I've always told people that social credit as used by China was unsed to track dishonest businesses who scammed people and/or other businesses by breaking agreements and not delivering as promised.

To be fair, that's the outcome. But there has been attempts to make more problematic, more intrusive, darker versions of this. They just never worked out for technical or ethical/legal reasons. And they made a nice picture to frame the competing culture, darker than they are.

[greyw]

If your borrow money and give it to someone else and that someone else loses it how is it the borrower's fault or even problem?

[torginus]

It's not the borrowers fault, and in case of banks, it's not even their problem thanks to credit score and extensive guarantees built into the system.

However when I'm paying for some work to be done in the future, I'm essentially lending the contractor money predicate on the work being done by a certain deadline, quality or even at all.

So I'm the lender until the job is done, and if the borrower defaults on this it's not my fault, but certainly my problem.

[greyw]

Sorry I meant lender.

Anyway my point is that if you become a lender for a nontrivial sum of money it might sense to hedge that risk (insurance, credit risk entrustment, ...)

[skeezyboy]

> The bank is protected automatically but it's up to you have to run after your money yourself.

oh yeah and whos guaranteeing borrowers for these banks? source would be nice but I bet you dont reply

[Animats]

Overview from 2022. One city really did set up a full social credit system, but that was a pilot project and didn't work out.[1] There are some private "social credit" systems, like the one from Ant, but that's more like a rewards program - buy stuff, get points.

China has had a lot of official social control for centuries, but it was local and managed by local cops.[2] As the population became more mobile, that wasn't enough. But a single national system never emerged.

There was a work record history, the Dang'an, created by the Party but to some extent pre-dating communism. This, again, was handled locally, by Party officials. This system didn't cope well with employee mobility. But it didn't get built into a comprehensive national system, either.

China is authoritarian, but most of the mechanisms of coercion are local. Local political bullies are a constant low-level problem.

Kind of like rural Alabama.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/22/1063605/china-an...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dang%27an

[gowld]

You are conflating "social credit score", which hasn't been built out in China (although blacklisting, imprisonment, and torture for wrongthink has been built out), with "financial credit score" which exists in USA via private companies working togther, and "credit reports" which exist in both USA and China. China's is run by the unelected, dictatorial government.

[darthoctopus]

perhaps read the actual first paragraph of the article? the whole point of it is that, whether we call it that or not, our privately run reputation scores (including but not limited to credit scores) functionally are social credit scores --- except we've been boiled frogs, and should take some time for self-reflection before engaging in knee-jerk reactions to China's other failings (which I'm not denying btw) whenever social credit is brought up.

[throwawayq3423]

Your credit score in America will never be used to deny your freedom of movement within America or go against you or any of your family members when applying for higher education.

It is a fundamentally flawed comparison.

[scarmig]

It will, however, be used to determine whether you can rent or buy a home or increasingly even get a job. Freedom: same outcomes, but modulated through the market!

[throwawayq3423]

> determine whether you can rent or buy a home

Yes, that's the point of a credit score.

> increasingly even get a job

Do you have any citation of proof of this? I've never heard of this happening even once.

[AnimalMuppet]

It might be used to deny your kid a college loan, though - which might work out the same as denying them higher education.

[platevoltage]

It absolutely works the same way. There are would be doctors everywhere who never got the chance because of their parent's mistakes, or misfortunes, because we've made higher education a privilege in the country.

[corimaith]

At this point of extrapolating from second-order/third-order effects, what dosen't count as "social credit" to you? It seems that if society dosen't give everything you want, that's seen as coercion.

The actual distinction here is between positive/negative rights. In OP's case, it's if even if you do have the money to do X thing, you are artifically not allowed to do so. That's a violation of negative rights.

In your case, you're positing that if you couldn't afford it anyways, it's "social credit" if private lenders don't give you help because you have a history of not paying loans back. That's an appeal to positive rights, that people have a active obligation to you, and it's not even from the government but from private lenders. That's a far more contentious assumption that ironically isn't held by the Chinese or the CCP or most of the world for that matter outside of a spoilt corner of the West. And it's a critique that dosen't even land in reality when the Fed does provide easy student loans at a far greater scale than the Chinese Government. A policy that has worked out swimmingly well!

[throwawayq3423]

I don't believe that simply because of the predatory nature of student loans. They'll give them to literally anyone.

[timeon]

In US they have just one more party than in China. Also 1 person is not automatically 1 vote.

[NoGravitas]

"The United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them." -- Julius Nyerere

[corimaith]

So you believe there is no difference between what Trump is doing today and what Kamala/Biden might have been doing?

Democracy is about balancing different interests. So yeah, it is hard when the change you want isn't neccessairly what others believe in. You do need to compromise with other groups. Which means that large, coaliation parties that emerge will naturally regress to the mean. But ironically, that also is the suremost sign of plurality that things very much are different from authoritarianism where it pretty is just one interest group trampling over all the others. Well, some here might prefer that, but they are almost definetly not going to be the ones in charge.

[NoGravitas]

In effect, the difference is much less than you imply.