Part 1: How China Undermines Democracy

A lucrative one-party monopoly on corruption is just the tip of the iceberg in China’s authoritarian social model. It’s also one of its most poplar exports.

Worried that permitting political freedom would jeopardize its grasp on power, the Chinese Communist Party has constructed an Orwellian high-tech surveillance state, and a sophisticated internet censorship system to monitor and suppress public criticism.

Public dissent is already harshly punished in China. Activism will result in your arrest. China’s prisons are brutal and torture is common. Your family will be punished, as well.

Beijing was long focused on building a “Great Firewall” to prevent the people of China from being exposed to any criticism of the government from abroad. But, the Great Firewall also monitors what Chinese do and say online, and censors delete anything Beijing does not want its people to know.

In a new knife-twist, what censors don’t like is now being added to a vast scoring system being created that will monitor the behavior of all citizens, and rank them all based on their "social credit.” While still in the early days, the chilling scope of this new totalitarian tool becomes clearer every day.

Like private credit scores, a person's social credit score can move up and down depending on their behavior. As in the West, not paying your bills is a big deduction.

But in China, the system encompasses much, much more. The exact methodology is a secret — but other examples of infractions include bad driving, smoking in non-smoking zones, spitting, or being a bad dog owner. Penalizing those is good, though they can be sanctioned with specific laws rather an Orwellian all encompassing score.

It will also judge whether you buy too many video games, waste money on “frivolous purchases,” or use birth control. Chinese companies like the online retailer Alibaba and social media company Tencent are not only happily providing the information to the government, they’re helping to build the network.

Severe deductions come from posting “fake news” online. In China, fake news includes anything about the massacre of democracy demonstrators in Tienanmen Square. Or the billions Xi Jinping’s family has in the bank. Or questioning whether forcibly moving people from their homes to build a road is “glorious progress.”

In other words, say or do anything the Communist Party dislikes, and you will be punished on a nationwide blacklist.

Here are some of the sanctions already in place:

Bans from flying or getting the train.

Nine million people with low scores have been blocked from buying tickets for domestic flights, Channel News Asia reported in March, citing official statistics. Three million people are also barred from getting business-class train tickets.

Keep you out of the best hotels.

If you don’t think that’s much of a deterrent to the middle class from speaking out, I suggest you try a Chinese three-star hotel. You’ll never complain about a Day’s Inn again.

Ban you — or your kids — from the best schools.

In July, a Chinese university revoked an incoming student's spot because his father had a bad social credit score.

Can’t buy a house

Chinese investigative journalist Liu Hu who is on the blacklist says he was blocked from buying property.

Stop you getting the best jobs.

There’s also a snitch line, so you can report people by phone and online. Finking ups your social credit. In more rural places, informants have been hired to score their neighbors. From the South China Morning Post:

Yang Qiuyun’s home in eastern China heaves under a mountain of paper files. They are scattered on top of cabinets, piled on the water dispenser and stacked up on her bed.

The files are filled with forms completed in her neat handwriting, records of the laborious work she carries out as one of 10 “information gatherers” in a village at the forefront of an experiment in social management: China’s social credit system.

Every day, Yang, 52, roams Jiakuang Majia village with a pen and paper in hand, writing down every instance of free labor or other donations her fellow villagers make to the community – two points for Ma Shaojun for taking eight hours to install a new basketball hoop in the village playground; 30 points for Ma Hongyun for donating a 3,000-yuan (US$445) TV screen for the village meeting room; and 10 points each for Ma Shuting and Ma Qiuling who have a son serving in the army in Tibet.

At the same time, points are deducted for bad behavior such as littering or neglecting care of elderly parents.

The potential for extortion and abuse is chilling.

China’s propaganda is all about relativity. It says social credit is like an American credit score. Of course, in the U.S. a credit score can’t punish people for exercising basic human rights like freedom of speech and assembly. Nor do your neighbors score you.

This would be bad enough if it applied only to the 1.2 billion people of China, 20% of all humanity.

But China’s government sees human rights as an existential threat. Like any authoritarian regime, if the people show anywhere they can choose who leads them, why can’t they here?

That was another contrast with Western Europe that lead to the failure of the Soviet bloc.

So, China has undertaken a massive coordinated effort to export its model abroad. Russia and Venezuela have already embraced Social Credit. The government of still democratic Serbia is curious.

And it’s exporting its other authoritarian “worst practices,” too.

The most glaring example is in the area of technology and surveillance, where it uses Huawei’s “Safe City” products to undermine democracy globally and prop up totalitarian regimes. Chinese cities are rife with Huawei’s gear and the network grows every day.

China is home to 18 of the world’s 20 most monitored cities and over half the surveillance cameras in use globally. It’s estimated China will have 567 million cameras installed nationwide by 2021. By comparison, the U.S. has 85 million.

Beijing, which has 1.15 million cameras, topped the list in terms of the number of cameras installed – around 60 cameras per 1,000 people – followed by Shanghai with 1 million.

But Taiyuan, capital of the central province of Shanxi, and Wuxi, in Jiangsu province near Shanghai, were the two most surveilled cities in the world on a per capita basis. Taiyuan had about 465,000 cameras for nearly 4 million people – more than 110 cameras per 1,000 people.

Huawei uses the scale it has created at home to export its products abroad at a low cost. The Chinese tech giant has signed “Safe City Agreements” with 50 governments, most of which have a record of poor governance and serious problems with corruption. Huawei says it has put its equipment in 160 municipalities.

What are “Safe Cities?”

Huawei floods designated areas with closed circuit TV cameras. Say near typical gathering places for local demonstrations.

It also uses the so-call Internet of Things to connect the cell phones of people in the area to the cameras to create a real time movement tracker. The cameras, equipped with facial recognition technology, increase security and look for crime. Of course, if you define crime as people who oppose the government, the cameras look for that, too. And they find them.

A Wall Street Journal investigation found Huawei had been helping the Ugandan and Zambian regimes track opposition politicians. That includes the popular musician and Ugandan MP Bobi Wine, who last year was jailed in a maximum-security prison for his role in a street protest.

That’s not all. In Serbia, another country that has instituted Huawei’s surveillance system of facial and license-plate recognition. Chinese police officers help patrol the streets of Belgrade, a security presence officially billed as assisting the growing number of Chinese tourists who visit the city. In reality, they are teaching the Serbs how to control “troublemakers.”

Technology is not all China is giving to authoritarian regimes. It also has a massive plan to create an empire for itself by corrupting and capturing local elites. We’ll explore that in Part 2.