China is using social credit apps to gamify the government

Imagine you’re boarding an airplane only to find an incredibly rude person sitting in your seat, refusing to move. Not even pleas from a flight attendant can get the person to budge.

In a perfect world, you might think that this person would be banned from ever flying again. Well, that might actually be possible… in China.

Photo credit: Shao-Chun Wang / 123RF

Chengxin Chunyun, an app made by local government agencies, allows users to take photos of unruly train and plane passengers and upload them to the platform along with a description of the offenses. These could include cutting in line, smoking, and fighting. In theory, once an incident has been verified, the annoying passenger could be banned from taking a flight in the future.

Chengxin Chunyun no longer appears to be active, at least at the time of this report, but this is just one of many apps – some similar and some very different – that belong to China’s effort to expand its social credit system across the country.

Media have described the social credit system as a dystopian scheme. Common comparisons include an episode of Black Mirror and the system of social control seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. But the truth is much more complex.

Social credit as it exists today is actually made up of many different systems, and its goals are often more mundane than enabling digital authoritarianism.

The system might be best described as a database that gathers information on citizens and companies, according to Kendra Schaefer, head of digital research at Trivium China, a Beijing-based China policy analysis firm.

However, parts of it wade into the delicate territory of tech-powered social engineering. Various systems work differently, but many aim to reward the “good” and punish the “bad,” sometimes by awarding points.

More often, however, it’s done by naming and shaming blacklisted individuals, especially those who fail to comply with court orders. And this is where applications of social credit start to become more Orwellian, and the ethics get fuzzy, according to Trivium’s research.

One well-known punishment is blacklisting people from high-speed trains, planes, or other things considered luxuries. There are 13 million people on one credit blacklist maintained by China’s courts.

But more eyebrow-raising examples can be found elsewhere, and local governments have been working on putting out the tech tools that enable their citizens to put pressure on society’s black sheep.

Wondering who you shouldn’t do business with? There are now at least a dozen apps that allow users to search the court’s blacklist of laolai or deadbeats – people who have failed to fulfill court orders and repay debts. One of them is the Laolai Checker app, which also allows you to report a deadbeat.

One court in eastern China even incentivizes snitching on local deadbeats by sending advertisements to their friends and family on WeChat, offering them money for telling the court about new debts.