China Issues

How Big Data are changing the world:

China’s Social Credit System
Lorenzo Testa

On June 14th , 2014, the State Council of China published a document

concerning the construction of a shehui xinyong tixi, or Social Credit Sys-
tem (SCS), to be realized before 2020. It consists in a mechanism which
tries to classify and evaluate the behaviour of citizens and legal people (which
includes companies and any other entity), determining scores of citizenship,
or "trustworthiness". These scores can result useful and be considered in
many different sectors, from bank loans to hotel bookings.
The SCS works in three phases:
1. Data collection. This phase collects and stores information about
people (see the left part of Figure 1 on page 3);

2. Score elaboration. Basing on the data collected in the previous

phase, in this step the SCS produces a score, which determines the
grade of "trustworthiness";

3. Reward and sanction distribution. This last phase is the only one
that has a direct consequence on the real life of individuals. In fact,

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 during the third step, the SCS rewards citizens with a high score and
disadvantages the ones with a low score (see the right part of Figure 1
on the next page).

At the moment, the SCS is voluntary, because it’s not completed yet,
but it will become mandatory in 2020, once that the project will be finished.
Tests and experimentations have already begun, following a watch-and-learn
approach, both from public and private initiatives. As far as they present
interesting differences, we should analyze them separately.

Public SCS. This first type of SCS wants to boost the respect for Law,
in four main aspects: administration, trade, social organization and
justice. The mechanism should reduce actual problems, such as forgery
and health scandals. The public SCS computerises and integrates data
owned by government, from economic to health ones. It’s interesting
to notice that even firms will have to follow the public SCS;

Private SCS. This other type of SCS doesn’t forecast mandatory partic-
ipation. In fact, in 2015 the Chinese Central Bank authorized eight
private firms (such as Tencent, which owns WeChat, and Alibaba) to
develop different SCSs, conducting pilot-studies. In particular, Sesame
Credit, run by the Ant Financial Services Group, an affiliate company
of Alibaba, implemented a system which measures individuals with a
score ranging between 350 and 950 points. Alibaba hasn’t - obviously
- revealed the algorithm behind its SCS, but we know that it is influ-
enced by five different factors: credit history, fulfilment capacity
(defined as "a user’s ability to fulfil his/her contract obligations"), per-
sonal characteristics, behaviour and preference (consisting in a
judgement shaped by the kind of products that people buy), interper-
sonal relationships. In 2017, Sesame Credit got 520 million users.

If correctly implemented, the SCS may help solving different issues in

the Chinese society and economy. For sure, it may facilitate an "IT-backed
authoritarianism" in the sense that it may digitalize the various forms of
control that already exist. In economic terms, the SCS may help internalizing
externalities into business decisions. The SCS could become a "powerful, big
data-enabled toolkit for monitoring, rating and steering the behaviour of
market participants into a politically desired direction", realizing China’s
ambitions.
At the moment, many aspects of the project still have to be finalized. In
two years, anyway, the SCS could (and would) become the most sophisticated
tool for market and social regulation, pushing China even further than where

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it is today. We will see. In the meanwhile, we have to admit that the
Social Credit System is, by far, one of the most innovative and interesting
applications of Big Data to the real world.

Figure 1: China’s tight grip on enterprises. Retrieved from MERICS.