Accepting But Not Using It? Digital Participation in Local Social Credit Systems

• In Event: Technologies of Governance in China: Law, Campaigns, and Social Credit

Abstract

The Chinese government’s announcement to build a nationwide Social Credit System (SCS) by 2020 (State Council, 2014) triggered a discussion of China’s domestic and global surveillance operations. Yet, by 2022, there is no unified and standardized SCS but instead we observe fragmented localized practices. Municipal governments have initiated their localised SCSs and developed digital platforms to facilitate citizens’ participation in these reward-centric projects. Previous research finds that Chinese citizens express high level of support towards the SCS (Kostka, 2019; Wang, 2019). Yet, some recent reports also suggests that only a small percentage of citizens have engaged with local SCSs (e.g., 5 percent in Xiamen and 15 percent in Hangzhou) (Drinhausen & Brussee, 2021). Given the inconsistency between the public’s supportive attitude and the low registration rate, this study interrogates how Chinese citizens actually engage with local government-led SCSs in their everyday lives, which remains largely understudied. Based on 62 in-depth interviews conducted between 2018 and 2022 with 62 participants living in different cities across China, our findings confirm and highlight the conspicuous contradiction between interviewees’ high-level acceptance of SCSs and their relatively low-level willingness to actually participate in the local SCSs. We find that when it comes to their actual practices for engaging with local SCSs, interviewees demonstrated little desire and interest. Only a limited number of interviewees have registered their local SCSs, mostly due to the mandatory requirement for job performance and career promotion. Reluctant and passive participation and non-usage of SCSs, however, was foregrounded as the most common pattern in citizens’ digital participation. Our findings suggest that interviewees’ low engagement with the local SCSs can be explained by the following key explanatory factors (a) lack of awareness of local SCSs, (b) digital literacy and skills, (c) little and/or unclear benefits, (d) potential risks (e.g., data privacy), (e) lack of transparency and accuracy of local SCSs, and (f) the required efforts to manage the credit scores. We further find that many of the functions offered by local SCSs were already offered by platforms through large digital technology companies, such as Alibaba or Tencent. As such, local SCSs lacked in attractiveness and were simply also ‘late in the game’ as citizens were already using private platforms for certain services offered by SCS. Overall, citizens’ actual engagement with state-led SCSs is currently limited, highlighting constraints to China’s ambitious plans to create a nationwide SCS system.These findings also help to explain why the Chinese state expands its surveillance capacity without much opposition from the public.

Authors

• Genia Kostka, Freie Universität Berlin

• Haili Li, Freie Universität Berlin