China is using social credit apps to ‘gamify government’

Through blacklists and awarding points, China's social credit system is an experiment in social engineering

Reading Time:5 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

Some experts fear that facial recognition data from China’s ubiquitous surveillance cameras will become a part of the social credit system. (Picture: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)

Masha Borak

Published: 10:00am, 21 Oct 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Imagine you're boarding an airplane only to find an incredibly rude person sitting in your seat, refusing to move. Not even pleas from a flight attendant can get the person to budge.

In a perfect world, you might think, this person would be banned from ever flying again. Well, that might actually be possible… in China.

Chengxin Chunyun, an app made by local government agencies, allows users to take photos of unruly train and plane passengers and upload them to the platform along with a description of the offenses. These could include cutting in line, smoking and fighting. In theory, once an incident has been verified, the annoying passenger could be banned from taking a flight in the future.

Chengxin Chunyun no longer appears to be active, at least at the time of this report, but this is just one of many apps -- some similar and some very different -- that belong to China's effort to expand its social credit system across the country.

The inspiration for this “bad traveler” app came from a real-life incident that went viral in China in 2017. (Picture: National Development and Reform Commission of the PRC)

Media have described the social credit system as a dystopian scheme. Common comparisons include an episode of Black Mirror and the system of social control seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. But the truth is much more complex.