China just announced a new social credit law. Here's what it means.

Ever since 2014 when China announced a 6-year plan to build a "Social credit system" that would reward actions that build trust in society and penalize the opposite, it has been one of the most misunderstood things about China in Western discourse. On November 14, several top government agencies collectively released a draft law on the Establishment of the Social Credit System, the first attempt to systematically codify past experiments on social credit and, theoretically, guide future implementation. "This draft doesn't reflect a major sea change at all," says Jeremy Daum, a senior fellow of the Yale Law School Paul Tsai China Center who has been tracking China's social credit experiment for years, noting it's not a meaningful shift in strategy or objective. So what's China's current social credit system actually like? Do people really have social credit scores? Is there any truth to the artificial intelligence-powered social control that dominates Western imagination? This is another common myth about China's social credit system: To keep track of over a billion people's social behaviors, there must be a mighty central algorithm that can collect and process social credit data. "Big tech companies and small tech companiesplay very different roles and they take very different strategies," says Shazeda Ahmed, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, who spent several years in China studying how tech companies are involved in the social credit system. "Saying that the system is an extension of the law only means that it is no better or worse than the laws it enforces. As China turns its focus increasingly to people's social and cultural lives, further regulating the content of entertainment, education, and speech, those rules will also become subject to credit enforcement," Daum wrote in a 2021 article.