Shading “Credit”: Blacklists, Black Accounts and Black Markets in China’s Social Credit System

Abstract

In an attempt to promote “trustworthiness” in society, China is experimenting with a nation-wide social credit system that combined the existing technology of credit scores with more expansive measures, norms, and behaviorial data. Those who have been defaulters on China’s banking record or the database of China’s online lending platforms may be blacklisted in the social credit system and sentenced by the court to be “Trustbreaking Enforcement Subjects” (失信被执行人). Based on 12 months’ online ethnographic fieldwork and 6 months’ offline ethnographic fieldwork, the paper introduces the life encounters of people who were labelled “laolai” (老赖), the blacklisted defaulters, on the online credits platforms that emerged in the past ten years, under the state-encouraged banners of “financial inclusion” and “financial innovation”. It examines the politics and ethics behind their “financial inclusion” (credit expansions with online platforms) and social exclusion (through the data collection of online behaviors and the algorithms that calculated their credit scores and filtered them out). It reveals the unintended consequence of the social credit system intended to promote “trust” in China’s “moral vacuum” and the importance of human value and relational ethics. The paper contributes to the studies of the ethics and governance of AI-empowered social sorting by the technocratic state and market based on the big data.