“China’s Social Credit System: Data-Driven Governance for a ‘New Era’,” Current History (September 2019). ACCESS TEXT HERE: https://www.backerinlaw.com/Site/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/curh_118_809_209.pdf
Abstract: “Social Credit,” and the accountability culture for which it serves as a proxy, has emerged as a key element in the transformation of the governance structures of China, including its understanding and implementation of a rule of law based system compatible with the fundamental political line, that is of the core political principles, of the CCP. As such it represents more than a mere set of “new governance” techniques, or some mad effort to develop an arbitrary Orwellian control apparatus. Rather, it gives expression to the long term and quite fundamental objectives of the CCP to detach (finally) the organization and operation of politics, economics, and society (including its culture) from its roots in the ideologies and practices of liberal democracy (and its economic expression through markets based regulation underpinned by state protected rule of law concepts, including Western notions of human rights). In its place, and now quite publicly under the leadership of Xii Jinping, the CCP has accelerated its efforts to develop an ideology, vocabulary, and set of practices that give expression to what it believes are socialist reframing of core concepts of legality, of democratic expression, of the obligations of states and of the duties of its vanguard, consistent with Chinese Marxist-Leninist principles. To understand China today, then, one has to come to terms with “Social Credit.” To understand “Social Credit,” in turn, requires situating its “system” within a larger complex of accountability and supervision principles at the heart of the project to remake fundamental conceptions of law and the role of the state.