Moral Digital Governance on the Ground: A Study of Personal Social Credit System in Urban China

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 15: Policing, Surveillance, and the Carceral State

Abstract

Why do moral governance systems that promise universal, objective rules generate unequal access and imbalanced participation? This article examines moral digital governance through a case study of Longshan's Personal Social Credit Score System (PSCS), a local social credit scoring program in northern China. Combining descriptive statistical analysis of 2,362,201 participation records (2019–2023) and three-level cluster analysis (2023) with 135 semi-structured interviews and ten months of participant observation (2023–2025), we propose a model of nested-institutionally mediated capital conversion that integrates institutional nesting and capital conversion. We show that the system generates stratified outcomes. Participation clusters into five groups, with a small, resource-rich subset that has broader access channels, participates frequently and across multiple routes, concentrates in the high-score city channel, and accumulates the highest scores. Most residents, facing tighter constraints, participate only occasionally and through limited channels, primarily within the low-score community track, and consequently accrue consistently lower scores. Moreover, in design, volunteer hours serve as a key measurable indicator and the main distinction between community-level and city-level participation channels. In implementation, these indicators and channel access are applied flexibly, enabling "dama," who have abundant free time and strong connections with implementers, to become the most active and highest-scoring group. Meanwhile, middle-aged on-duty Party members, despite having considerable personal and social capital, are only the second most active group due to limited available time. Freelance or retired community sanitation and maintenance workers, although they have ample free time and have participated multiple times, still have social credit scores near zero, mainly because their connections to implementers are limited. We argue that this stratification is not merely a reflection of preexisting inequalities but arises from the differential conversion of individual resources mediated jointly by design choices and implementation practices.

Authors

• mingjing Yin, The University of Hong Kong

• Cheris Shun-ching Chan, University of Hong Kong