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My favorite China "fact" is that everyone has a social credit score, which is adjusted based on your politics, and if it falls too low you can't get a job. No Chinese person I have asked about this has any idea what this supposed to be referring to.
The only thing anyone can come up with is Sesame Credit, which is a credit scoring service run by Alibaba and modeled on Equifax/Experian/TransUnion, except it appears to have far less impact on anyone's life than those three companies.
Everyone who reads the New York Times and Washington Post *knows* about China's social credit score, and yet it doesn't appear to exist in any practical sense. And we're supposed to trust the rest of their China reporting?
To those linking the Wikipedia page: I've checked the sources on there before. They are all:
1) Western media
2) Dead links
3) The initial proposal by the CCP from 2014, which was vague and preliminary
4) Some Chinese sources that tangentially mention some future proposed score
1) Western media
2) Dead links
3) The initial proposal by the CCP from 2014, which was vague and preliminary
4) Some Chinese sources that tangentially mention some future proposed score
The most anyone can say is that there may be, at some point in the future, some sort of credit scoring service that might, in addition to financial info, include information about criminal history or legal judgments. Which is like... pretty tame compared to what we have here.
And it's a far cry from what most people in the west seem to believe, which is that in the year of our lord 2020 every Chinese person cowers in fear of expressing their political opinions, lest they tank their social credit score and die of starvation.
This seems to be a good source on the matter, for those interested: https://twitter.com/deflatermaus/status/1290388883029594112?s=20
Okay, last reply, but here's a fun fact: the exact calculation of the various credit scores (FICO, etc) in the US are considered trade secrets. I used the work at the a Federal Reserve Bank research department and even we didn't know how exactly they were calculated.
