‘Bigger incentives will mean bigger public buy-in’ for China’s social credit schemes
- Rewards on offer in two non-punitive test schemes not enough to generate broad community interest, researcher says
- More than 40 local governments across the country testing systems of rewards and punishments to promote ‘trustworthiness’ in society
Dev Lewis, a fellow at the Hong Kong-based think tank Digital Asia Hub, said he studied test schemes in Xiamen, Fujian province, and Fuzhou, Fujian province, and found only a minority of residents opting in to the cities’ low-key programmes.
“I think the key will be when you get good incentives for people to join and then they will – then, you will have that scaling up. [Right now] the rewards are not that great anyway, so people don’t really care that much,” he said.
But other researchers warned that a focus on incentives could just be official cover for intruding into people’s lives.
Xiamen and Fujian are two of more than 40 local governments across the country testing systems of rewards and punishments to promote “trustworthiness” in society.
The pilot schemes are separate from central government blacklists of “untrustworthy” individuals and businesses barred from air and train travel as well as access to financial markets. But the authorities aim to scale the schemes up into a national system by 2020.
Lewis, whose study was funded by a grant from Yenching Academy at Peking University, said that residents in the 40-plus schemes were assessed on their “adherence to laws, promise keeping and credit in daily life”, with some cities using scores as a tool.
Residents could boost their scores by paying their utility bills on time, donating blood, volunteering, and working in the public sector. And only public data from government bodies and state-owned enterprises was used to calculate the score.
While people who opted into the Xiamen and Fujian schemes were not penalised for a bad score, the rewards for their good behaviour were small. In Fuzhou, for example, citizens with high credit scores could join an express queue for government services, while high scorers in Xiamen could borrow library books without paying a deposit.
“In its present iteration the scores seem more like a government version of a loyalty scheme – all citizens get access to the basic service however some can opt-in for fringe benefits for convenience and comfort,” Lewis said.
So far, only 21 per cent of Fuzhou residents and 5 per cent in Xiamen have registered for the programmes.
Lewis said this was because of the limited range of rewards for good behaviour, as well as authorities’ lack of promotion of the schemes.
“[Authorities] haven’t gone on a full-on propaganda blitz that you are usually accustomed to seeing with new policies,” Lewis said. “According to people we interviewed, it’s pretty much been left to a word-of-mouth strategy.”
“Being lower-level tier two and three cities, Xiamen and Fuzhou are less in the limelight so they have more freedom to experiment and innovate,” Lewis said.
But Lewis took aim at the systems’ lack of transparency around the metrics used to score people.
He said factors such as “employment strength” and “personal ability”, which were used in Fuzhou’s social credit system, were difficult to quantify.
Shazeda Ahmed, a doctoral candidate who is researching China’s social credit system at the University of California, Berkeley, said local governments were likely less willing to risk imposing punitive measures that may be excessive or ineffective.
“Their resources are limited, social credit pilot tests don’t strike me as being among their most pressing priorities,” she said.
Adam Knight, a Leiden University doctoral student who is also researching the topic, said the authorities’ emphasis on rewards over punishments might be “largely a tool for propaganda” that served as a cover for the social credit system’s intrusiveness into people’s lives.
Knight said there had been a noticeable trend in the past few years to “introduce a more positive slant to the system”.
“The idea behind it is to create user buy-in among the population for a policy that is otherwise incredibly invasive … under such a system of incentives and user buy-in, citizens ‘want’ to be rated,” he said.
