The Chinese consumer credit market isn’t wide enough to construct scores from scratch - debit cards trounce credit cards in popularity - and there’s no obvious way for the government to divine creditworthiness through its records. The People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, maintains credit histories for only 320 million citizens out of the 1.4 billion population. By comparison, only one out of ten US citizens fall into this creditless camp. Three out of every four Chinese citizens lack publically available credit histories. Yolanda is right: China needs a nationwide credit rating system so that responsible borrowers have access to a line of credit. Vendor Chen Chao, 34, claims that “an electronic file will be more convenient for ,” and state-owned sports company employee Yolanda Liu, 30, practically demands SCS, stating, “China needs a credit system so that people like me who are responsible can get more benefits.” It even goes so far as to claim that SCS will “strengthen credit construction in the area of population and birth control.” According to Premier Li Keqiang, this comprehensive system will “give sufficient incentives to whistle-blowers” of antiregime behavior and have “an integrated punishment and black list mechanism so that one dishonest behavior will result in restrictions at every turn.” Yet despite the Orwellian nature of the new system, some Chinese citizens are welcoming the return of totalitarian data collection. The State Council’s planning document suggests that SCS will combine government, bank, e-commerce, criminal, and health data. In an odd twist of fate, a fundamental free-market need - the ability to assess individual credit risk - has driven China to a system that seems more interested in serving as a loyalty program for the country’s “socialist core values” than aiding its burgeoning consumer finance industry.
The State Council, China’s cabinet, stated in a planning document that SCS’s “objective is raising the honest mentality and credit levels of the entire society.” Yet the need for some sort of credit score in China is real. If the scope of this system seems gargantuan, that’s because it is. To do this, the government is pulling data from four key areas - “administrative affairs, commercial activity, social behavior, and the judicial system” - and building a robust private industry of competing social scores. When SCS becomes mandatory in 2020, it will construct scores for every citizen based on not only credit risk, but also sincerity. The score, part of China’s Social Credit System (SCS), is the government’s attempt to evaluate each of its 1.4 billion citizens, FICO-style. In its place, China is developing a score that individually ranks citizens based on their moral fiber. However, dang’an is not dead it’s just been digitized. But with the rise of China’s market economy and the increased mobility of Chinese citizens, the dang’an’s influence has waned to the point that today 74 percent of Chinese citizens believe dang’an has no influence over their lives. Since the Mao era, the government has maintained the dang’an system in which each citizen’s dang’an, or personal file, served as a womb-to-tomb dossier - comprised of school grades, job evaluations, political leanings, and much more - meant to help the Communist Party maintain control over each individual. China’s citizens are no strangers to being monitored by, well, strangers.