Social Credit System UP053
The Social Credit System (Chinese: 社会信用体系; pinyin: shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì) is a national reputation system being developed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), under CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping's administration. The program initiated regional trials in 2009, before launching a national pilot with eight credit scoring firms in 2014. In 2018, these efforts were centralized under the People's Bank of China with participation from the eight firms. By 2020, it is intended to standardize the assessment of citizens' and businesses' economic and social reputation, or 'Social Credit'.
The social credit initiative calls for the establishments of unified record system for individuals, businesses, and the government to be tracked and evaluated for trustworthiness. Initial reports suggested that the system utilized numerical score as the reward and punishment mechanism; recently reports suggest there are in fact multiple, different forms of the social credit system being experimented with. Numerical system has been implemented only in several regional pilot programs, while the nationwide regulatory method has been based primarily on blacklisting and whitelisting. The credit system is closely related to China's mass surveillance systems such as Skynet, which incorporates facial recognition systems, big data analysis technology, AI and Project Maven.