In October 2018, Vice President Mike Pence paid a visit to the Hudson Institute—a conservative Washington D.C. think tank—to give a wide-ranging speech about the United States’ relationship with China. Standing stiffly in a shiny blue tie, he began by accusing the Chinese Communist Party of interfering in US politics and directing Chinese businesses to steal American intellectual property by “any means necessary.” Pence then turned his attention to the country’s human rights abuses, starting not with the persecution of religious minorities, but with a peculiar governmental initiative: the social credit project. “By 2020, China’s rulers aim to implement an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life—the so-called ‘social credit score,’” Pence said. “In the words of that program’s official blueprint, it will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.’”
The vice president’s remarks echoed a steady stream of Western media reports, published in dozens of outlets over the past few years, that paint China’s Social Credit System as a dystopian nightmare straight out of Black Mirror. The articles and broadcast segments often said China’s central government is using a futuristic algorithm to compile people’s social media connections, buying histories, location data, and more into a single score dictating their rights and freedoms. The government can supposedly analyze footage from hundreds of millions of facial recognition-equipped surveillance cameras in real time, and then dock you points for misbehavior like jaywalking or playing too many video games.
PRI's The World
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