In what way would you boycott China? Refuse to buy or use products made there? How likely do you think this could scale to an impact that would meaningfully impact China's trade?
And as horrible as I think the social credit system is, there's an interesting question, as people who don't live in China, what business it is of ours (except, perhaps, as a cautionary tale)?
This doesn't seem that easy - after all, most products in western super markets are made in China. Maybe people can stop traveling to China, but that wouldn't make a difference big enough for the Chinese ruling class to care.
But why restrict this question to China (though this particular article is about China)? Why not Saudi Arabia, for example?
as people who don't live in China, what business it is of ours
Because, if this works, other governments will follow, in no time and likely with Chinese government help. They will "learn" from Chinese government's "experience". Even if you didn't care about the plight of Chinese people, you'd surely care about your own countrymen's freedom? Tech surveillance is more dangerous than anything, because it is easier and cheaper to implement and it can scale, compared to any other system.
> This doesn't seem that easy - after all, most products in western super markets are made in China.
That is most definitely not the case, almost all of our groceries and soft goods (that supermarkets sell) come from domestic or nearby foreign sources. Perhaps you meant hypermarkets or discount department stores like Walmart?
The US is competing with China not just economically but socially as well. If China succeeds in creating a more 'productive' and 'complacent' population with its policies, expect the US government to do the same.
Remember the US still has the largest surveillance apparatus in the world. All they would need to do to implement a social credit system is to flip a couple of switches.
Those "switches" don't even need to be flipped by the US Government writ large. Boardroom meetings by "private" companies deciding to integrate ever more of the commercial surveillance infrastructure will suffice.
No, I wasn't talking about anything specific. Just the general setup of having a large part of US surveillance performed by commercial entities, combined with the ability of public companies administering critical services to refuse doing business with arbitrary individuals.
For example: see the "unbanked". Rather than fixing the banking system so that basic transactions do not rely on credit, it's easier to create a whole class of people that the industry tells to get lost.
I guess people can be blacklisted. Google, Microsoft, and a bunch of others have blacklists from which they harass people and the banks I guess can refuse to process individual's transactions in their version of an orwellian wet dream but they threaten the company's integrity when they do that many times over.
"O there just been a mistake at the bank" goes to "they are racially profiling me" very quickly. These very same programs target political activists.
Also it doesn't help that there are decentralized alternative popping up everywhere. If monero(crypto coin) ever became mainstream, the world would be a very different place.
That's exactly the same argument people made about apartheid South Africa. And yet nearly everyone would say sanctions and boycotts were appropriate and effective.
China has millions of minorities in detention centers with some highly questionable things happening to those people. If you believe in justice and human rights, it is everyone's business what happens there.
I don’t know. I sometimes manufacture physical products. I could state publically that I won’t. I could also not buy products made in China personally.
In general we ought to try to change things we don’t like. I can’t imagine the people of China like this system do they?
Presumably a system that promotes good behavior is well liked by people who haven't run afoul of it. And of course, via censorship practices, a very small percentage of Chinese citizens are aware of a lot of reasons they should be concerned about their government.
Russian citizens are also wildly enthusiastic about Vladimir Putin. It's not a safe assumption that people living in countries with authoritarian leaders disapprove of them.
> It's not a safe assumption that people living in countries with authoritarian leaders disapprove of them.
Also see Hitler's popular approval ratings [0] (Godwin's law notwithstanding). In August 1934, roughly 90% of German voters were in favor of the consolidation of the offices of President and Chancellor into a single Leader-Chancellor in the person of Adolf Hitler. Note that number should be taken with a big grain of salt, since there was tremendous social and political pressure to vote that way -- and a threat of repercussions for voting "no".
In all Bavaria Chancellor Hitler received the largest vote in his favor in the concentration camp at Dachau where 1,554 persons voted "Yes" and only eight "No" and there were only ten spoiled ballots.
> Presumably a system that promotes good behavior is well liked by people who haven't run afoul of it. And of course, via censorship practices, a very small percentage of Chinese citizens are aware of a lot of reasons they should be concerned about their government.
For that reason, I think it's important to take such public-opinion data with a grain of salt. You have to wait until people have enough direct contact with the system in question so they can form an informed opinion of it.
Its also illegal in Russia to make negative statements about the government or state. What people say in public about leadership is quasi dictatorships is possibly different than what they think in private.
> "Russian citizens are also wildly enthusiastic about Vladimir Putin."
As far as I'm aware, that's a bit out of date. It also, I believe, comes from a misconception concerning human nature, namely that popularity is uni-dimensional. Which is to say, Russians who believe Putin is a superb leader in foreign affairs, great at making Russia seem big and scary to the rest of the world, may also think Putin is an ineffectual corrupt thug when it comes to domestic affairs.
When high popularity ratings are attributed to Putin, the surveys ask a wide variety of questions:
> How do you feel about how Putin is handling foreign conflicts?
> How do you feel about how Putin is handling the economy?
> How do you feel about how Putin is handling the drug epidemic?
> How do you feel about how Putin is handling corruption and law enforcement?
Approval for Putin varies GREATLY between questions like that. When it comes time to make a headline, whichever measure is chosen depends on which bolsters the story. If the story is that Putin is highly effective at manipulating his population, then the dimension across which he's the most popular is chosen for the headline. If the story is that Putin's power in Russia is faltering, then a different dimension is picked for the headline.
It's not lying per se, but it's very similar to a form of p-hacking. Picking which result to report and ignoring the others is a trick used often in the media and academia.
See the nice little table at the bottom that breaks out Putin's approval rating on different issues. In 2015, 83% approved of the way he was handling Ukraine. This dropped to 63% by the spring of 2017. And by the spring of 2017, approval for how Putin is handling corruption is already below 49%. From this we can see there are Russians who approve of Putin's treatment of Ukraine who still think Putin is corrupt.
I'd be interested in this, but every Chinese person that I've spoken to (they haven't been back to China in awhile), seems to think it is either just like the American credit system or that the government already knows everything about them and that there's security through obscurity. Is this common?
Not considering politics for a second, I just couldn't imagine the impact of an Equifax like event with that amount of information.
And as horrible as I think the social credit system is, there's an interesting question, as people who don't live in China, what business it is of ours (except, perhaps, as a cautionary tale)?