Where is the outrage from the international community? Ah, they are, as everyone else, still obsessed with president Trump.
China banned people from buying plane or train tickets 23 million times last year because their social credit scores were too low, according to the Associated Press, which obtained a copy of a government report.
The government rolled out the travel ban on people with low social credit scores last May. According to a report from China’s National Public Credit Information Center from last week, people have been blocked 17.5 million times from purchasing airplane tickets, and 5.5 million times from buying high-speed train tickets. These people had become “discredited” for unspecified behavioral crimes. That’s up from only 6.15 million citizens being blocked from taking flights as of 2017, according to China’s supreme court.
As part of the system, the Chinese government also employs a public blacklist of those who have been found guilty of crimes in court and punishes them partly by limiting their ability to buy plane and train tickets.
Social credit scores are also supposed to help prevent annoying behavior on public transport, such as one case where a passenger who took up another person’s reserved seat and refused to get up. The video of the passenger refusing to budge went viral, with Chinese users calling for more punishment for people who act this way.
The Chinese government has independent policies in place to monitor individuals and punish bad behavior. Your social ranking in the government’s eyes might be lowered if you evade taxes, scam other people, make fake ads, or take up extra seats on the train. Currently, whenever a person passes by a checkpoint, like when crossing into another city, or entering and leaving China, they’re asked for fingerprints and identification already.
Once the files are successfully collected, the hope is that authorities will be able to search for them based on fingerprints and other biometrics. By 2020, China aims to have a file on every Chinese citizen that includes all the data collected on their behavior, according to publicly available government documents translated here.
Correction March 1st, 6:33PM ET:This article has been corrected to reflect that people were blocked 23 million times from buying tickets. It wasn’t that 23 million people were blocked. We regret the error.
China has been openly polluting for years without a peep from the global community. What makes you think they’d give a shit about a few peasants being denied public transit?
That is the yukiest thing I ever read from you! Why would any one want this? The is complete Orwellian within a dystopian landscape, and if we allow that to happen we might as well slice our wrists or shoot ourselves in the head because living under such a system would be a living hell!
So we should usher in a system that will make prisoners of us all in order to force those who resist manners? Sorry, your response while true in some respect is not a reason to punish the rest of the population for societies ills, in which there are other non invasive solutions to be considered!
This is a good topic to discuss and something a free society must never condone. Good manners becomes subjective and authoritarian. This is what we already have laws for to take care of criminally dangerous conduct.
I see that some people are confusing / conflating the wrong things here. I think that if you dont mind your manners on public transportation, steal, urinate etc, then you should be put on a black list, and services are refused to you specifically for that violation. This “social credit” thing is different: if you browse dubious content from youtube, if you were late on your credits card, if you voted a certain way or are vocal about the local government etc… then they can ban you from services unrelated to your “offense”.
Manners such as saying please and thank you? The opposite to having manners is being rude. It’s ok to be punished by the state for being rude? That’s a human right! We have “anti social behaviour” and “breach of the peace,” the latter of which I think is a catch all for whenever the pigs want to throw their weight around.
I think your missing the point in what I was trying to point out! In essence the solutions in addressing this problem is a slippery slope regardless if they were made in jest! How long before such issues along with others that are not mention will exacerbate the call by those in power to bring a similar (system to the us) remedy where such lewd behaviour is used for justifying adverse legislation?
