Accepting but not engaging with it: Digital participation in local government‐run social credit systems in China

Abstract

Over the past decade, China's central and municipal governments have consistently supported the development of social credit systems (SCSs). While research has highlighted the Chinese public's high approval and backing of SCSs, their engagement with these digital projects has not been fully explored. Based on 44 semi‐structured interviews, our research examines Chinese citizens' digital participation in government‐run SCSs at the local level. Our findings suggest that, despite perceiving SCSs as accepting and positive, most interviewees do not actively engage with local government‐run SCSs. Multiple factors can explain the gap between the high acceptance and low participation rates, including a lack of awareness regarding local SCSs, a perception that registering and maintaining a decent credit score requires major effort, various concerns involving data privacy and safety, algorithm accuracy and fairness, potential risks, unappealing benefits offered by SCSs, and the voluntary aspect of participating in local SCSs. Our research adds to the existing literature on digital governance in authoritarian contexts by explaining why Chinese citizens do not necessarily engage with state‐promoted digital projects.

Perceptions of social credit systems in Southeast Asia: An external technology acceptance model

“…These systems, developed by state agencies at both the central and the local levels of government, have garnered attention and even been labelled as ‘Orwellian’. However, their current application is limited to provincial and local pilot projects (62 projects as of 2022) (Drinhausen & Brussee, 2021; Li & Kostka, 2022), which vary in their scope of application and embeddedness in social life (Creemers, 2018; Liu, 2019), such as the Hangzhou government's Qianjiang Score (钱江分) and the Jasmine Score (茉莉分) of the Fuzhou provincial government. While some projects are less technologically intensive, as in Rongcheng (Gan, 2019), more advanced technology is used in Shenzhen (Creemers, 2018).…”

“…Conversely, citizens are likely to have less favourable opinions of SCSs once they gain user experience (Liu, 2022). Despite high approval rates, research has identified a ‘participation gap’ in SCSs, driven by factors such as limited awareness, reluctance to maintain scoring systems, uncertainties about calculation analytics, questions of voluntariness, unappealing benefits and data privacy concerns (Li & Kostka, 2022).…”

Civilized cities or social credit? Overlap and tension between emergent governance infrastructures in China

“…The most consequential and well-known of these in China is the nation-wide “Social Credit Blacklist System” that identifies, shames, and restrains “untrustworthy” businesses and individuals for breaking specific laws and regulations (Trauth-Goik & Liu, 2022). Municipal governments have meanwhile been charged with transforming the virtue of “trustworthiness” into more nuanced evaluative criteria through the creation of their own respective Blacklists/Redlists, as well as scoring and rating systems for individuals (Li & Kostka, 2022). Only recently have scholars attempted to conceptualize and explain how the SCSP actually operates as an “ecosystem” (Creemers, 2018) or “system of systems” (Drinhausen & Brussee, 2021), that builds from and coheres with a network of existing state programs (Tsai et al, 2021), that is, a governance infrastructure.…”

“…This ruling has brought a close to the most extensive of lower-tier social credit experiments. Today most local level social credit systems based on rating or scoring of individuals are “opt in,” and function more like loyalty reward programs with reportedly low rates of participation (Drinhaussen & Brussee, 2021; Li & Kostka, 2022).…”

A Survey of Digital Government: Science Mapping Approach, Application Areas, and Future Directions

“…Public participation and social media: The literature lacks in discussing e-participation in comprehending citizens' expectations of public participation [16,[41][42][43][44]. The security, privacy, and nepotism problems should be addressed in the literature to successfully implement social media utilization and e-voting systems [40,45,46].…”