Thecapitalinthenorth.blogspot.com Website Review

A blog about life in China (and anything else which I feel like writing about) Over the past year, one of the biggest China stories to strike the world's attention has been the social credit score which the Chinese government is supposedly getting ready to as*ign to every citizen. I can no longer count the number of times that I have heard the words Orwellian and Black Mirror used in conjunction with this topic. Most gravely, this issue made its way into US vice-president Mike Pence's momentous and confrontational speech about China on the 4th of October, widely described as the portent of a new cold war. After China's rulers aim to implement an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life - the so-called There is only one problem: the narrative that claims the Chinese state is going to as*ign every single citizen a score that will determine their social standing and many or all aspects of their life is essentially one big myth. This misconception seems to have originated due to reporters, probably in good faith, conflating a pretty mundane government plan to extend a system of social credit scoring to all companies and organizations by 2020 with credit score systems set up by private companies like Alibaba, and perhaps some local government schemes. None of these initiatives come close to being some sort of all-encompas*ing system that catches every citizen Yesterday's article by Jamie Horsley, published in Foreign Policy, does an excellent job of putting the record straight. Entitled the piece provides a realistic view of China's current social credit policies, and of what misunderstandings might have fuelled the over-the-top reporting on this topic. Jeremy Daum, who runs the excellent China Law Translate website, has also done a good job A still from the nightmarish Black Mirror episode where every person is given a social media score that updates in real time.  I don't find it hard to see how this myth of a dystopian social credit system could have arisen. Chinese laws and government plans are