Exclusive | This small team is building a social credit system app for China’s youth to determine who’s naughty or nice

Tucked away in a nondescript office on the sixth floor of state-owned Tsinghua Unigroup’s building near Beijing’s Zhongguancun tech hub, a small team of around 30 is working on a system that could help to shape the fates of hundreds of millions of Chinese youths.

Founded in 2015, China Youth Credit Management (CY Credit) is working with the Communist Youth League Central Committee (CYLCC) and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) in a leadership group to develop a social credit system for the nation’s youth.

By gathering, sorting and analysing a huge amount of data on everything from someone’s educational background to what is in their online shopping trolley, CY Credit has been able to launch an app that is designed to give college students and fresh graduates a taste of the rewards brought by having a good social record.

Not to be confused with a person’s basic credit history, such as a US FICO score, the app builds a digital footprint of young people’s behaviour and uses that data to incentivise actions considered as positive or socially beneficial. Although similar to how a bank offers higher credit limits with lower interest charges to model customers, social credit is much wider in scope and includes non-financial actions such as antisocial behaviour and volunteering.

CY Credit, which is wholly owned by China’s top state-backed chip maker Tsinghua Unigroup, wants to build a big-data credit system that covers all Chinese people aged between 18 and 45 – which is estimated at around 460 million.

“Unlike other social credit programmes that build black lists to do risk control, our credit system is designed to encourage good behaviour, offering credit guidance to China’s increasingly globalised youngsters on how they need to behave to be in line with their overseas counterparts and become leaders and role models in their generation,” Shi Yanying, president of CY Credit, said in an interview with the South China Morning Post, the first with overseas-based media.

Named “unictown”, the app gives each user a credit score between 350 to 800 after its self-developed algorithm parses six different dimensions of data, including: personal information, volunteer work, social connections, credit history, consumption history and track record of honouring contracts.

In the case of college students, “positive information” such as publishing a research paper, obtaining an intellectual property right or working as a volunteer in nursing homes can all potentially lift an individual’s credit score. Conversely, cheating at exams and plagiarism can lead to negative results in a credit score.

Those with low credit scores will not be punished as such, they will just not receive the same benefits that those with scores above 640 – considered as “excellent credit” – will be entitled to, such as discounts when buying online courses within the app or even being parachuted into the second-round of interviews when applying for jobs.