Clever Geek Handbook

The Chinese social credit system is, first of all, not a citizen assessment system, but a massive API

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It is rare when a hot topic appears in which few people understand, like the Chinese social credit system (SSC).



Most people, imagining CCK, consider it primarily a rating mechanism, a way for the central government to assign Chinese citizens and companies a certain rank based on their behavior. But this is a distorted idea of ​​what the CCK really is. In fact, CCK is perhaps best described as a service for exchanging data; more technologically advanced readers can imagine it as a massive national-level API [program interface].



The Chinese government sees its role in the CCK not in assigning ratings, but in maintaining the scored points, in consolidating government files in a central database of social credit records, in which it then provides the ministries, city governments, banks, industry associations and the general public; the latter already make their own assessments.



The main SSK database has already been created; it is called the National Credit Information Dissemination Platform (NPRCI), and quite a significant portion of the data collected in it is available publicly.



Although the government itself has not yet created a flagship application for working with social loans, it actively encourages local governments and private developers to create mobile applications that incorporate data from NPRCs in innovative ways.



This year, the National Development and Reform Commission (PRC), the state organization responsible for introducing the SSC in China, held a competition with awards for creators of social credit applications; It is assumed that on the basis of this platform, representatives of the private and public sectors can learn something new by studying each other's innovations. A similar event, the Xinhua Credit Cup, which took place on September 24–25, was launched in order to mark outstanding achievements among projects to develop the theme of urban social credit.



We examined several mobile platforms that won the competitions from these two conferences, as well as several interesting platforms that did not make it to the winners. In general, these applications paint an interesting picture of the mobile ecosystem growing around SSC.



Who was the bad boy? Behavioral applications



Chengxin Chunyun 诚信 春运



Government Agencies: PRC, Ministry of Transport, Public Security Bureau, Ministry of Civil Aviation, Chinese Railways, etc.

Developers: Tianxia Credit, Pengyuan Credit



Once a year, China has the largest human migration, chunyun. At this time, hundreds of millions of Chinese are returning to their hometowns to celebrate the Spring Festival , or Chinese New Year. In the holiday season of 2019, 3 billion passengers traveled for 40 days. At this time, public transport is seriously overloaded, and due to the presence of a huge number of people in a limited space, the subject of public discussion every year is the behavior of travelers.

CCK linked behavior on airplanes and on trains that violate the norms or laws to the personal credit record of passengers of transport. Fighting, damage to equipment, smoking, stowaways, opening fire exits and other violations can lead to a person being banned from traveling in the future. These incidents are usually reported by aviation or rail officials, but the Chengxin Chunyun app, released in 2017 by a consortium of government agencies and lending companies, allows users to download such examples on their own. The corresponding mini-program for the WeChat messenger was launched in 2019.







The application accepts positive and negative reviews about the quality of transport services and passenger behavior. Users can upload certificates in the form of photographs, and after an appropriate investigation and confirmation of incidents, these reports are recorded in the citizen's CCK file.







There are no statistics on the number of users or the number of investigations that ended with the addition of entries to the CCK, but this program has been running for three years in a row, which indicates the presence of a certain effectiveness.



Laolai Checker - 老 赖 查询



Developer: Xiamen Tuoke Network Company (厦门 拓 客 网络 科技 有限公司)



The black list is one of the key elements of the Chinese CCK. The largest emergency in China is the Black Bankruptcy List, administered by the Supreme Court, which monitors the “laolais” - citizens and companies that do not comply with court decisions.



The data from this blacklist is open to the public, and there are at least a dozen applications that allow users to search on them. One of them is Laolai checker, an application for finding debtors who find themselves in bankruptcy situations.





Search engine home screen





searching results



Users can search by the name of the debtor, view the history of court decisions and see the current status.





Details of the proceedings



Applications for a personal loan: checking the data of CCK citizens



One of the most enduring myths associated with SSC is that the Chinese government assigns a social loan to every citizen. Usually they say something like this: every citizen of China receives social security points from the government based on his behavior. People with a low level of social credit are ostracized, and with a high one they become a new elite.



The problem is that this is simply not true. As of September 2019, the state government did not assign a credit rating to any Chinese citizen.



Yes, some citizens get a credit rating. This is because city authorities, encouraged by the government, are developing their own scoring systems using SSC data. Some cities in China have already deployed similar systems as part of their experiments, and many other cities are preparing to follow suit.



These intracity rating systems give residents a (usually) digital rating based not only on financial factors, such as paying debts, but also on social factors, such as whether they received rewards for civil merits, whether they engaged in fraud or plagiarism, whether they missed child support payments, or donated blood or volunteered to work.



However, before starting to draw parallels with the series Black Mirror, it is worth noting that cities develop their rating systems independently. Although this situation may change, there is still no state-approved standard for accounting for social loans, so each city evaluates its inhabitants differently. In Suzhou, the rating value can vary from 0 to 200. In Hangzhou, from 0 to 1000. And even in cities with the same ranges, the algorithmic models used to determine these ratings vary.



In many places where rating systems were launched, developers entered into agreements with local governments to release several applications that allow citizens to check their city rating. In each of the cities, a slightly different approach is used: in some, such as Fuzhou and Nanjing, the properties of social loans are built into existing applications for urban services, in others, separate applications for working with social loans are created. We will look at examples of each of them.



My Nanjing 我 的 南京



Government Agencies: China Nanjing, Nanjing Information Office

Developers: Nanjing Zijin Digital Cloud Information Technology Company (南京 紫金 数 云 信息 技术 有限公司)

Website: mynj.cn



If you want to look into the future of Chinese mobile public services, you just have to look at the application “My Nanjing” - a universal platform for managing the life of the city. This application is incredibly ambitious, and despite the abundance of features, well-made.



It links urban transport, environmental data, hospitals, service providers, attractions, civil services, courts, schools, local financial institutions, and charities.





Main screen



In the application, city residents can:









And only a small part of the application is tied to social credit, in addition, Nanjing has not yet assigned a rating to citizens. Instead, the user, after entering the application, can study certain aspects of his social security files, including:









This is not to say that social credit does not play a role at all in this application. It has an award system designed for the gamification of environmental protection. Green Points are assigned to users based on their choice of vehicle, for walking, cycling, using the bus or metro. Citizens can earn a lot of points without driving in the days of particularly severe air pollution.







According to recent announcements, earning these points gives you little: they can be exchanged only for a small souvenir at the My Nanjing service center, but a more serious reward system is already being developed.



Xiamen Egret Points App 厦门 白鹭 分



Government organizations: Xiamen City Credit Department

Developer: Xiamen Information Group Big Data Operation Company (厦门 信息 集团 大 数据 运营 有限公司)



In contrast to the previous one, the Xiamen Egret Points app [Xiaon Heron Points] is fully focused on the CCK issue. Xiamen is one of the key demonstration cities of the CCK project, and it has already launched a city-wide rating system based on data from China, and issues a loan in the range from 0 to 1000. By mid-2018, the developer reported on the availability of data for 2.25 million citizens in the application - About half of the total population.



Registered users of the application are much smaller. In August 2018, there were 173,000, and a year later it became 210 059 - not so much a take-off in 12 months.







The small number of users is probably due to the fact that the application is just a loyalty reward program, where users can monitor their rating and rewards for a high rating. However, as in Nanjing, the advantages of a high rating are not particularly impressive. Among them:





However, about half of registered users use these features. Dev Lewis from the Berkman-Klein Harvard Center writes:



In Fuzhou, more than 64% of registered users used their points at least once to receive bonuses. In Xiamen, this percentage is slightly lower - 53% - which includes 55,562 people who took books in the public library without collateral. Library services are popular in Xiamen, and according to the Jiming library, the number of readers taking books to their homes has increased by 370% since the introduction of the rating.

Scoring algorithms work according to the principles of the Western credit rating mechanism. Dev Lewis writes:



Xiamen uses the FICO scoring model, which was used in the United States by the bulk of credit rating agencies to assess the solvency of citizens, but with modified variables.



Corporate Social Credit: Market Regulation Applications



Although Western commentators are obsessed with the use of social loans as applied to ordinary citizens, the main purpose of collecting data for CCKs is to regulate the behavior of enterprises in the market and force corporations to comply with existing rules.



From the point of view of Chinese lawmakers, a significant part of the enforcement process is to provide the public with access to data on the credit history of entrepreneurs and service providers, so that the market itself uproots bad companies. Some of these applications are designed for specific industries, while others focus on enterprises in a particular city.



Yiwu Market Credit 义乌 市场 信用



Government Agency: Yiwu Municipal Market Regulatory Authority



The city of Yiwu is the center for the development of the corporate social credit theme, and not surprisingly: there is the world's largest wholesale market for small goods. Yiwu International Trade Center spreads over 5.5 million m 2 , it has points for more than 75,000 manufacturers, and it is the center of many global supply chains.



To help buyers evaluate the legitimacy, reliability and quality of the product of the suppliers of the shopping center, the regulatory authorities launched a portal to search for a credit rating with profiles of manufacturers and indicating their data from China, including:





Application properties allow users to search by business owner, company credit rating or market point number.







The platform goes too far, assigning companies a rating in the AAA-D range, a star rating and a numerical rating. Since the idea of ​​ratings is to predict the risk of working with a particular supplier, the abundance of rating systems blurs meaning from these ratings.







The application is also distinguished by patriotism, and a significant part of its capabilities is aimed at promoting the initiatives of the Communist Party in the business environment of Yiwu. Companies associated with the Party are marked with special icons on the search results screen, and a significant part of the application is devoted to showing statistics of local branches of the CCP and its members.











Promotion of Party ideas on the market is one of the goals of President Xi Jinping, and from our point of view, the inclusion of these features in the application is aimed at obtaining approval from the upper echelons of power. And this, apparently, works: the application has received several national awards.



Yunmanman 云 满满



Developer: Jiangsu Manyun Software Technology Company (江苏 满 运 软件 科技 有限公司)

Website: ymm56.com



Over the past few decades, China's logistics industry has been suffering from serious problems, from overloaded trucks to delays and abandoned deliveries, from cargo damage to contract violations and fraudulent deliveries.



Yunmanman, a platform for tracking deliveries, in part a place to find partners, partly an escrow service provider, hurries to the rescue. Two different applications - one for drivers, the second for suppliers - bring users together from a base where 1.6 million shippers and 6.5 million registered truckers are located. Shippers make an advance payment for transportation costs, and the platform transfers money to truckers after delivery of the goods.







Yunmanman also spent considerable time developing her rating system for both drivers and shippers. Like the national social security system, the system in the application assigns a rating for both financial and ethical indicators. And both of these sides are worth exploring.



Speaking in 2017, company director Zhang Hui described the difficulties truckers face in taking loans and building personal credit histories:



Truckers are a special caste; many of them do not have higher education; they work in a high-risk environment. They spend most of their time on the highway and in car services, so their consumer habits are difficult to track. Therefore, it is difficult for financial institutions to evaluate their creditworthiness based on traditional models. However, they make good money and have stable consumption opportunities.



Yunmanman solves this problem by sending driver data to partner banks, allowing drivers to apply for a loan while on a flight and gain instant access to finance through the app.



On the behavioral side of the rating, Yunmanman maintains a blacklist of drivers and shippers, tracking incidents related to damage to goods, refusal to pay, truck overload, delivery time and other problems. Currently, drivers on the platform’s blacklist of drivers contain 0.31% of users, and 0.16% of companies are blacklisted of shippers.



The application’s approach to rating was highly appreciated by the NDRC, and there is a high probability that in the future this application will be included in government platforms and the data will be downloaded from the NDRC. In June 2017, Shen Jianzhong, director of the NIDRC, visited Yunmanman's offices and expressed the hope that:



Yunmanman's fully operational rating system will be linked to government data.



Jiafu E 家 服 E



Developer: Zebra Software Technology Company (斑马 软件 技术 有限公司)



Domestic services is another industry where a mobile rating system is being introduced. The Jiafu E app consolidates data from NPRCI, employer reviews, and other metrics into a platform for evaluating and finding nannies, home cooks, parasite fighters, repairmen, locksmiths, nurses, and cleaners.







Jiafu E was launched in March 2019, and mainly operates in southern cities such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing and Shanghai, and is about to expand to 60 cities, eventually reaching the national level. The application enjoys the support of the NDRC, and in some parts of the country, for example, in Nanjing, it integrates with the credit platforms of local governments ("My Nanjing" and "Women's Federation").



The platform gives potential users access to rating databases of consumer services companies, and provides standard corporate data for CCK:









For freelancers such as nannies and nurses, users can view the following data:





Jiafu E uses all this data in its own rating system, assigning points to companies and freelancers.







These points should not be confused with a national credit rating. They are not appointed by the government, but by the application algorithm. Still, developer support for such applications is based on national policies that encourage strong enterprise oversight.



It may seem that household services are a fairly banal sector in order to spend money on this. However, all this becomes more clear in the context of the rapid aging of the population of China, which is why the demand for the services of home nurses and cooks will grow.



This is just the beginning.



This, of course, is not a complete list of applications that use data from NPRKI: there are about two hundred of them. In April, 77 applications were submitted to the NRCRC competition, more than 300 platforms and projects for the Xinhua Cup. Given the government’s ongoing desire to create a rating-based digital market, we expect that the scope of this data will continue to grow.



Watching the development of this topic, it is more interesting to monitor not the number of applications using the central government database, but whether these applications will give their data to government organizations, and if so, how this data will be integrated into the social credit ecosystem.


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