By Jannelle Dang

Features Editor

This month, the Communist Party of China began developing a social credit score system accompanied by an extensive surveillance network with facial recognition technology.

These citizen scores are meant to encourage behavior that aligns with the government’s principles, while simultaneously punishing those who violate laws, criticize the Party, or engage in activities that are deemed disfavorable. Participation in this system will be mandatory for all Chinese citizens by 2020.

According to IHS Markit, a British financial services company, there are currently 176 million surveillance cameras in China. However, the implementation of citizen scores could increase this amount to 626 million, allowing constant surveillance of people’s actions. This advanced network would also match citizen’s faces to their online activity, collecting data from the internet and private businesses to create profiles for each individual.

Such profiles would be updated with information about the person’s political involvement, comments on social media, and online purchases. This data will be used in an algorithm to calculate a score between 350 and 950 that measures trustworthiness.

Scores can be impacted by the activity of people’s friends and family as well. Interactions with individuals with low scores, such as political dissidents, could decrease a person’s own number.

Consequences for those with poor scores include increased limits on internet access, travel bans, and restriction from holding highly-ranked job positions. However, punishment for negative credit scores are more severe. A citizen’s ID card number, which is needed for activities from boarding a flight to creating a social media account, could be blocked, and he or she could be publicly shamed by the government when his or her name is added to the Chinese Supreme Court’s blacklist of discredited individuals and organizations.

Conversely, benefits for satisfactory behavior include easier access to loans, visas to travel within and outside the country, and other rewards.

Although the main purpose of the score system is to reduce crime and terrorism to ensure national security, it could also help regulate China’s economy. Examining the scores of business owners could expose corrupt practices, and citizens with qualifying scores would be able to take loans or credit from multiple banks besides their own.

Initial plans for the development of citizen scores were introduced in 2014. A year later, a voluntary credit score system was created via an app called Sesame Credit to serve as a trial.

Sesame Credit determines scores not only based on one’s financial records and ability to pay, like American credit scores, but also on the type of items one purchases. Buying items the government approves of can raise a score, while purchasing alcohol or video games could decrease it.