People Don’t Understand China’s Social Credit, and These Memes Are Proof

This is what happens in China, according to popular memes about the country's social credit system that poke fun at the Communist Party's supposed ideology control, saying people lose "Social credit" points for failing to toe the party line. There is just one thing: What's portrayed in the memes is not what China's social credit system is about-at all. "It reflects the very common misperceptions about the social credit system, that everybody in China has got a social credit score. And if your score goes down or it falls below a certain level, you are going to be blacklisted, and you are going to be dragged off to the gulag or something like that." The social credit system is one of the most misunderstood things about China. Chenchen Zhang, a political scientist at Queen's University Belfast who has studied China's social credit system, said the social credit meme, which falsely uses social credit as a shorthand for all sorts of control, shows the difference in the perception of China between people inside and outside of the country is further widening. Jeremy Daum, a senior fellow of the Yale Law School Paul Tsai China Center, said at a July discussion on China's social credit system organized by The Diplomat that the myths became popular because they resonated with a global fear of increasing surveillance by governments and companies. At least for now, the type of ideology control depicted in the popular memes takes place outside of the actual social credit system in China.