Cumhuriyet Üniversitesi İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Dergisi

Abstract

After the beginning economic reforms and open door policy in 1978, China has experienced a marked worsening of corruption. The pervasive influence of corruption in China gives citizens cause for concern. In this context, the social credit system, officially issued by the State Council in 2014 and still evolving rapidly, aims to leverage big data to improve integrity, sincerity, trust level of the whole of Chinese society, to establish joint punishment mechanism for impeding serious trust-breaking. The system monitors and investigates its individuals, enterprises, government branches, and non-government organisations and categorizes them trustworthy or untrustworthy according to their behavioural data. This system is also comprised of blacklists and red lists systems that provides reward and punishment mechanisms. Indeed, data-driven system have publicly encouraged the ‘naming and shaming’ of individuals and businesses presented on blacklists. Under social credit system, local governments have largely designed their own model city pilot projects in 2017. Model cities have been selected to enact their own different systems. It therefore has no general rule framework. So far, the western observers and media have described the social credit system as a threat to privacy and referred as an Orwellian project. The Chinese people, on the other hand, have long perceived the system as a good response to the growing of corruption scandals. Chinese leaders have also deeply voiced concern regarding scandals, linking the Party's legitimacy to its effectiveness to combat corruption. But, at the end of the day, still under construction, the effectiveness of this system is seen far from optimal. In this context, this article seeks to analyse the process of the social credit system. Based on the findings, the paper further highlights the moral advantage and disadvantages of the social credit system. By contrast, this paper provides an overview of the analysis on the Chinese social credit system to better understand its implications, process, perceptions and data-driven system. In this regard, the main research questions of the article are how the social credit system emerges and how it adapts to Chinese society.