Social Credit System
Chinese state-run system for evaluating businesses
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| 2023 | As of this year, there was no uniform method for publicizing blacklists within the Social Credit System. |
| 2023 | Academic Filip Šebok wrote about the most common myth of the Social Credit System: the belief in a single numerical score recording individuals' behavior. |
| 2023 | Academic Vincent Brussee noted that European misconceptions about China's Social Credit System have become a source of amusement among Chinese Internet users. |
| 2023 | Most private social credit initiatives are shut down by the People's Bank of China (PBOC). |
| 2022 | Academics Diana Fu and Rui Hou published an article 'Rating Citizens with China's Social Credit System', noting the persistent Western misconceptions about the system. |
| November 14 2022 | The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) issued a draft Law on the Establishment of the Social Credit System, which was critically viewed by academics as unsubstantial and merely reiterating existing policies. |
| October 2022 | A study by professors from Princeton University, Freie Universität Berlin, and Pennsylvania State University revealed that explaining the repressive potential of the Social Credit System significantly reduces public support, while state media coverage tends to increase support among Chinese citizens. |
| October 2022 | A study by professors from Princeton University, Freie Universität Berlin, and Pennsylvania State University finds that the Social Credit System is commonly used to repress protesters, petitioners, journalists, and political activists in Chinese localities. |
| February 2022 | Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) reports that a social credit 'score' is a myth, with no single score determining a citizen's societal status. |
| 2021 | Social Credit System became an internet meme on various social media platforms, reflecting discontent toward Chinese government restrictions. |
| 2021 | Rongcheng revises its social credit pilot program to make it strictly voluntary and capable of issuing only rewards. |
| December 2021 | China issued the National List of Basic Penalty Measures for Untrustworthiness and the National Directory of Public Credit Information, establishing limitations on credit information collection and usage. |
| December 31 2021 | By the end of 2021, over five million citizens had been affected by the Social Credit System's blacklisting scheme in some form, demonstrating the extensive reach of the system's implementation. |
| November 2021 | UNESCO adopted a Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, which advised against using AI systems for social scoring or mass surveillance purposes, with China as a signatory. |
| October 2021 | The Jamestown Foundation explored the function of the Social Credit System, concluding there were widespread misinterpretations about its mechanism. |
| March 2021 | The Diplomat published an article explaining that the Social Credit System is primarily a financial risk assessment tool, not an Orwellian surveillance system. |
| March 2021 | The Diplomat remarked that Western assumptions about the Social Credit System as an Orwellian surveillance system exaggerate its real-life purpose and function. |
| 2020 | Private financial credit scoring companies, including Sesame Credit, suspended financial credit ratings during the COVID-19 pandemic. |
| 2020 | China further improved to 31st place in the Ease of Doing Business index, with claims that the Social Credit System played a significant role in this advancement. |
| 2020 | Planned completion date for the nationwide social credit system, though no full-fledged system was actually implemented by this time. |
| 2020 | The Supreme People's Court announced that 7.51 million blacklisted judgment defaulters had fulfilled legal obligations and been removed from the judgment defaulter blacklist, representing half of the total blacklisted defaulters. |
| November 2020 | The State Council issued Guiding Opinions on improving systems for restraining untrustworthy entities and building long-term credit worthiness mechanisms. |
| May 2020 | Caixin investigative media group published a report highlighting the ineffectiveness of business social credit systems in China. |
| February 1 2020 | The People's Bank of China temporarily suspended the inclusion of mortgage and credit card payments in credit records for people impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. |
| 2019 | Central government expresses dissatisfaction with pilot cities experimenting with social credit scores and issues guidelines preventing punishment based solely on low scores. |
| 2019 | Beijing government officially announces plans to explore and test a 'Personal Credit Score', with potential negative records for inappropriate behavior in rapid transit systems. |
| 2019 | Sarah Cook of Freedom House reports that city-level pilot projects for the Social Credit System include rewarding individuals for reporting on religious practices, such as coercing Falun Gong practitioners to renounce their beliefs and reporting on Uighurs who publicly practice Islamic traditions. |
| 2019 | A Hebei court launched an innovative app that displays a 'map of deadbeat debtors' within a 500-meter radius, encouraging public reporting of potential debtors who could repay their obligations, as part of efforts to enforce court rulings and create a socially credible environment. |
| 2019 | High-level NDRC officials reported that over 10% of people blacklisted for tax fraud had repaid taxes, the bad credit rate had decreased by 22.7%, and the proportion of blacklisted companies had decreased. |
| 2019 | Chinese central government expresses dissatisfaction with pilot cities' social credit score experiments and issues guidelines preventing punishments based solely on low scores. |
| November 1 2019 | Shenzhen implements traffic violation tracking for residents 14 and older, with negative credit profile records for jaywalking, red-light crossing, and other traffic rule violations. For those under 14, legal guardians may need to complete educational courses or social services. |
| October 2019 | Professor Kui Shen of Peking University Law School published a paper in China Legal Science suggesting that some credit policies potentially violated legal rights and principles of human rights. |
| October 2019 | Caixin media group reported that business social credit systems in China were insufficient in deterring problematic business activities and could be easily manipulated. |
| August 2019 | Zhengjie Fan, an assistant researcher at China Institute of International Studies, published an article arguing that the Social Credit System's punishment policies do not overstep legal limits and have contributed to China's improved ease of doing business ranking. |
| August 1 2019 | Guangzhou introduces policy to add negative records to credit profiles for residents who cheat in national, provincial, or municipal examinations, or fraudulently use public transportation identification or fake ID cards. |
| August 1 2019 | Hangzhou starts recording negative credit profiles for individuals and organizations that do not comply with the city's waste sorting rules, with corresponding fines. |
| July 2019 | Wired reported on misconceptions regarding the Social Credit System, noting that Western concerns may have outstripped actual occurrences. |
| July 2019 | An additional 2.56 million flight tickets and 90,000 high-speed train tickets were denied to individuals on the blacklist by the Chinese authorities. |
| July 2019 | The NDRC stated that personal credit scores can be used for incentives but cannot be used for punishments. The Hong Kong Government explicitly denied plans to implement the social credit system in Hong Kong. |
| July 8 2019 | Nanjing begins tracking traffic violations, with negative credit profile records for moped drivers and pedestrians who commit 5 or more traffic violations in a year. |
| June 2019 | Samantha Hoffman of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute argued that the Social Credit System lacks genuine protections for people and can be politically manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party. |
| May 2019 | Logic published an article by Shazeda Ahmed arguing that foreign media had distorted the Social Credit System into a technological dystopia. |
| February 2019 | MIT Technology Review discussed Western controversies and scholarly perspectives on the Social Credit System, highlighting it as more of a propaganda tool than an enforcement mechanism. |
| 2018 | The New Economics Foundation conducted a comparative analysis of China's Social Credit System by examining similar rating systems in the United Kingdom, highlighting parallel data-driven scoring mechanisms used for job applications, social services access, and targeted advertising. |
| 2018 | Professor Genia Kostka from Free University of Berlin conducted a cross-regional internet survey of 2,209 Chinese citizens, finding 80% approval for China's Social Credit System, with more socially advantaged and older citizens showing the strongest support. |
| 2018 | In selected intersections of Beijing and Shenzhen, personal information of traffic violators is publicly displayed on screens, with potential future recording of red-light violations in credit profiles. |
| November 2018 | Bing Song, director of the Berggruen Institute China Center, published an opinion piece in The Washington Post arguing against misreporting of the Social Credit System's mechanics. |
| November 2018 | Foreign Policy published an article exploring factors contributing to misconceptions about China's Social Credit System. |
| November 2018 | Beijing produces a detailed plan for social credit system implementation from 2018-2020, including provisions for blacklisting people from public transport and publicly disclosing individuals' and businesses' untrustworthiness ratings. |
| October 2018 | U.S. Vice President Mike Pence publicly criticized the Social Credit System, describing it as an 'Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life'. |
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