China’s Social Credit System

‘If you’re a soldier in China, applying to leave the army is likely to leave a black mark on your social credit score.’ This was the striking opening line of a Sixth Tone article from April 2018 reposted on the Chinese military’s official website. The article was about the use of a social credit…

‘If you’re a soldier in China, applying to leave the army is likely to leave a black mark on your social credit score.’ This was the striking opening line of a Sixth Tone article from April 2018 reposted on the Chinese military’s official website. The article was about the use of a social credit…

The pandemic virus, 2019-nCoV, is testing many of the assumptions of a highly interconnected, modern, globalised world. This 120nm virus, small to us, large by viral standards, is shining a light on many of our ways of living. It is a clash between traditional lifestyles, civets and bats in a…

By Katherine Drabiak The acclaimed One Child Nation, streaming on Amazon Prime, provides a haunting look at the reasoning, implementation, and consequences behind China’s (now revised) One Child Policy. Director Nanfu Wang expertly weaves together interviews from population health officials, medical professionals, and family members to describe how government policy…

Getty Images / WIRED This may be the year we see the world’s first sovereign digital currency. First discussed more than five years ago, China’s DCEP (short for Digital Currency/Electronic Payments) looks to be nearing completion. There have been some false starts; reports initially said there was a chance it…

Skip to comments. Companies Join With Government to Erase Fourth Amendment Privacy ProtectionsTownhall.com ^ | January 28, 2020 | Bob Barr Posted on 01/29/2020 2:44:05 AM PST by Kaslin In years gone by there existed an understanding that one’s personal…

In addition to the obvious terrors — gutting our social safety net, near-wars with North Korea and Iran, the family separations, and the everyday racism and xenophobia — the Trump era has been threaded with two subtler but no less damaging afflictions: confusion and paranoia. Not knowing on any given…

Over the past decade, China has developed a means of extorting conformity and compliance by ranking and sorting its 1.3 billion citizens into two main categories: the compliant, who are materially and socially rewarded, versus the less conforming, who are materially and socially punished. Social control is the obvious aim…

Americans are experimenting with methods similar to China’s social credit system. By tracking student movements and regulating faculty to standards of political correctness, they risk socializing young people to the methods of high-tech authoritarian state control. Syracuse University, the University of North Carolina and others are installing wi-fi apps and…

The American inheritance and the American promise are both precious and precarious. If we don’t defend them vigorously, no one else will. January 26, 2020 U.S. senator from Nebraska Michael Tunk / IdeasIn August 1784, when the American merchant vessel Empress of China finally docked in Canton (modern-day Guangzhou) after…